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Social Solutions in the Light of Christian Ethics 

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RELIGION AND LIFE 



BY 

THOMAS CUMING HALL 

4 < 

Professor of Christian Ethics 
Union Theological Seminary, New York 




New York: EATON & MAINS 
Cincinnati: JENNINGS & GRAHAM 



c 



i^n. 






Copyright, 1913, by 
THOMAS CUMING HALL 



)Ci.A343381 



IN LOVING MEMORY 

OF 

GEORGE WILLIAM KNOX, D.D. 

DIED IN 
SEOUL, KOREA, APRIL 25, 1912 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Our General Assumptions 1 

II. Primitive Religion 27 

III. The Twofold Interest 39 

IV. The Prophetic Interest 56 

V. Creative Idealism and Life 67 

VI. Religion and Mastery of the Material World 83 

VII. Religion and Society 94 

VIII. Types of Religious Development 108 

IX. Ethics and Religion 127 

X. Religion and the State 140 



Vll 



ANALYSIS OF THE ARGUMENT 

I 

Why our definition of religion must be general — 
A tentative definition of religion — ^The general im- 
portance of religion — ^The forms of religion either 
a waste or a benefit — ^The evidences that it is still 
a force — ^How shall we know whether it is true 
or not? — ^The character of knowledge — Experience 
as related to abstraction — Mathematics and knowl- 
edge — ^Knowledge and experiment — Knowledge and 
history — ^Religion and the personal life — ^The sci- 
entific method for the examination of refigion. 

II 

The primitive character of religion — ^Relation of 
religion to mystery — ^The study of so-called prim- 
itive man — ^Religion and magic — Meaning of mdna 
and taboo — ^Religion as the whole complex of prim- 
itive life — ^Its unifying power — ^The dependence of 
forms upon stage of culture — ^The conserving char- 
acter of forms — ^The cycle of the seasons — ^Myths 
and customs — ^The rise of a pantheon — ^The veg- 
etative and the astronomical cycles — ^The marks 
of a religion upon the round of life — Its traces in 
houses and music. 

Ill 

The priest and religion — ^The two types of re- 
ligious interest: the priestly and the prophetic — 

ix 



X ANALYSIS OF THE ARGUMENT 

Priestly interest in continuity — ^The ancient is the 
sacred — ^The priestly interest in order and cult — 
The rhythm of life and the education of the group 
under priestly control — ^The risk of overfunctioning 
— ^The basis of power in the authority — Priestly 
reaction and its reason — ^The danger to its ethics — 
Its thirst for power — Its services and degradation. 

IV 

The origin of the prophet — ^The relation of the 
prophet to the priest — ^The lowly origin — ^The dis- 
ruptive character — ^The false prophets — ^The dan- 
gers of the prophet — His vision — His relation to 
organization — ^The test of the prophet — Why we 
generally reject the true prophet. 

V 

The determlnist controversy and its main error 
— ^The newness of each day's world — ^The self as 
a factor in the new world of to-day — The ideals of 
to-day as factors in to-morrow — ^The materials and 
ideals for each new world — Conditions and mastery 
of conditions — ^Religion and creative idealism — Faith 
and the transformation of life — Cooperation with 
God in the making a new world each day — God and 
the creative ideals — Ideals and material fact — ^Man's 
part in the process — ^The prophet and the creative 
ideal — ^The rapture and ecstasy in the creative ideal. 

VI 

The way religious ideals organize the material 
life — ^The influence of the temple — ^The religious 



ANALYSIS OF THE ARGUMENT xi 

league — ^The decline of the Roman empire and the 
religious factors — ^The guilds of the Middle Ages 
and their art — ^The force of religion as inspiration 
to material mastery — ^The group ideal and man's 
material mastery — ^The religious ideal and its dog- 
matic content — ^The religious ideal and national 
safety — ^The religious ideal and international fellow- 
ship. 

VII 

Religion and human organization — ^The religious 
factor in marriage; in blood revenge; in the treaty; 
in courts and vows — The place of religion to-day 
in social relations — National churches and their 
function — ^The meaning of religious conformity — 
Religion and working faith — ^The religious factor 
in our culture, at home and abroad — ^Religious 
propaganda — ^The effect of scientific doubt upon 
man's activity — ^Evolution and religious faith. 

VIII 

The three main emphases in man's life of the 
soul — The emotional emphasis — ^The intellectual em- 
phasis — ^The pragmatic emphasis — Why religion is 
so often thought of as mainly emotional — ^The two 
types of emotional religion, the aesthetic and the 
mystical — ^Byzantime Christianity and the emo- 
tional life — New England's religious life — ^The in- 
tellectual emphasis with its dogmatic and specu- 
lative interests — ^The pragmatic type with its emo- 
tional or intellectual color. 



xii ANALYSIS OF THE ARGUMENT 

IX 

Ethics and religion in past relationships — ^Both 
are concepts that have hitherto resisted satisfactory 
analysis — Knowledge and mystery for the naive and 
the modern mind — ^The constant relation of the 
self to the All — ^ReUgion and science as "explana- 
tions" of the universe — Ethics deal with our rela- 
tions to fellow men, and reHgion with God and the 
universe of which our feUow men are parts — The 
imperative of life — ^The physical, the psychic, the 
moral and the religious imperative — The formula- 
tions of these imperatives changing constantly — 
The ultimate relationship in a highest ideal — ^The 
explosive force of religious and ethical revelation — 
The test of vitaUty in both. 

X 

Political attitudes to religion and the church — 
The Reformation and the church — ^The United 
States and estabhshed reHgion — ^The fundamental 
reason underlying change of view — What is divine 
right? — ^The church and the law of ser\ace — 
Religious toleration and its basis — ^ReHgion and 
group soHdarity — ^The cultural social bond — ^The 
claim to absolute knowledge in IMiddle Ages — 
Freedom and social solidarity— The transforming 
character of rehgious experience — Creeds and their 
uses — ^The use of words and the personal equation 
— ^The personal rights within an organization — 
Faith and its constant need for new forms of ex- 
pression. 



INTRODUCTION 

The opening years of our century mark 
a world-wide awakening. Men rise to 
question all the older formulae, and doubt 
has almost become the mark of a vital 
religion. Men and women ask with an in- 
creasing earnestness for a reason for the 
faith that is in them. Many are troubled 
by the doubts and diflSculties that are 
raised on all sides; some timid ones are 
quite panic-stricken. It is in the hope 
that some help may be rendered to those 
whose own faith may have been shaken, or, 
if not, to those who are in contact with 
thoughtful and earnest doubt, that these 
lines are penned. 

These few chapters are written with no 
purpose of setting forth an elaborate de- 
fense of the several items of a system of 
Christian faith, but simply to clear the 
way for an inquiry. We wish to show 
the importance and dignity of the religious 
claim, and to demand for it the attention 
its past history and present power deserves. 

xiii 



xlv INTRODUCTION 

Even in institutions that claim to be 
Christian the fundamental things of a 
religious intelligence are all too often but 
lightly dealt with. It is often assumed 
that young minds still start with the pre- 
suppositions of the past, whereas, in fact, 
the teachings of certain classrooms in 
that same institution may have worked 
havoc with all those presuppositions. It is 
to thoughtful men and women who are 
not in any sense specialists on the fields 
here touched upon that these chapters are 
written, and the hope is that they may 
give a point of view from which a fruitful 
study of religion is possible. Great conden- 
sation has been aimed at, and many longer 
expositions have been sacrificed to keep the 
book within certain limits both of compass 
and of price. May the reading of these 
pages strengthen intelligent faith and lead 
to a vital union with God's purpose as re- 
vealed in the person and work of Christ 
Jesus our Lord. 



CHAPTER I 

Our General Assumptions 

Any definition of religion must be at the 
outset seemingly vague and tentative. The 
usefulness of any definition depends upon 
the purpose of the definition, and no defi- 
nition can be exact for all purposes. The 
failure to remember this has given rise to a 
bewildering variety of definitions of reli- 
gion, for, like all great fundamental words, 
the very usefulness of the conception is 
its inclusive character. Such words as 
"beauty," "order," "line," "circle,"and "life" 
are only definite when the context is known 
in which they are used, for all these words 
describe a great variety of our common 
human experiences. How do we conceive 
of the beauty of a flower, or of music, or of 
a human face? What is beauty? When 
we say line, do we mean a definite mark- 
ing, or an imaginary circle like the equator, 
or a row of objects? Religion may be 
thought of as a definite, concrete develop- 
ment with cult and dogma, or as an inde- 

1 



2 RELIGION AND LIFE 

finable attitude of the human soul to the 
world of infinite being. Most of us have 
visual and particularistic minds. When 
anyone says * 'circle," we think generally of 
a particular circle, which then stands in 
some sort of symbolic relation to all cir- 
cles. So also when we hear the word 
"religion" we generally think of some 
complex of doctrines, or rites, or of some 
organization which we know, and only that 
which resembles what we thus know seems to 
us religion. A moment's reflection will show 
us that such a definition is too narrow for 
our purpose. Religious phenomena are so 
widely various that they cannot be judged 
by one type or one level of religious cul- 
ture. Indeed, it is difficult to find a com- 
mon characteristic that links all religious 
phenomena together. Not even belief in a 
personal God can be treated as absolutely 
essential, lest we rule out the higher forms 
of contemplative Buddhism which no one 
denies are religious. For our wide pur- 
pose, then, we may define religion as aii 
inward attitude of reverent relationship to that 
which is thought of as for the time of supreme 
moment, resulting in outward expressions, 



OUR GENERAL ASSUMPTIONS 3 

personal and social, that form complexes of 
rites, beliefs, and customs. 

This definition is both vague and very 
general. It must, in fact, be so if it is to 
include all the things which at one time 
or another we have called religious. And 
each one who reads it is likely to compare 
it with some one clear definite religious 
fact, which has become to his mind sym- 
bolic for all religious facts, and criticize it 
accordingly. But for the present we must 
be content with what is confessedly vague, 
in order not to exclude from our examina- 
tion things we distinctly feel have to do 
with religion. 

The moment we have so defined religion 
there can be no question as to the im- 
portance of its study. And this without 
any regard to the farther question as to 
how far there is any reality corresponding 
to that which a man thinks at the moment 
to be of supreme importance. This reli- 
gious attitude has played and still plays a 
prominent, if not the leading, part in 
human history. If one is asked to study 
any particular religion, many a cultivated 
man turns away at once from some feature 



4 RELIGION AND LIFE 

that he regards as outgrown — it may be 
miracle or sin or redemption — but no cul- 
tivated man can really deny the historical 
importance of these and other religious 
concepts. They have, along with many 
other religious notions, made and unmade 
history. 

Mohammedanism may seem to any of 
us essentially false, but the faith of mil- 
lions in Mohammedanism remains a car- 
dinal fact in the politics of Europe. It has 
dominated the whole attitude of Europe 
toward the Balkan states, and plays an 
important part in the foreign policy of 
England. What may seem to us absurd 
and trivial in the extreme may become, 
with religious feeling behind it, of momen- 
tous import. What men and women link 
with their highest hopes and most real fears 
is never for them trivial or unimportant. 
The belief of the Sepoys in India that they 
had to touch with their lips the fat of 
cows and pigs as they bit off the ends of 
their greased cartridges is said to have 
been not one of the least causes of the 
Indian Mutiny. To us this may seem 
trivial, and we may wonder at the strong 



OUR GENERAL ASSUMPTIONS 5 

prejudice against the fat of cows and pigs, 
but we should also try to understand 
the tremendous power that is behind this 
prejudice, and to comprehend the wonder- 
ful vitality of this force which, under the 
name of religion, has changed more than 
once the face of the world's civilization. 

It ought to seem inexcusable that any 
really scientific man should to-day ignore 
religion, no matter what he may think of 
the objective reality postulated in its forms. 
It surely is anomalous that one of the 
most brilliant writers on ethics should at- 
tempt to sketch its progress in Europe and 
forget to mention Christianity. Whatever 
may yet happen, the history of Europe is 
wrapped up, not only in religion, but in 
religious forms, and to-day no one can 
understand the rapid changes taking place 
in society without an intelligent under- 
standing of both the religious revolt going 
on, and of the strength of even evidently 
antiquated forms. 

Men enter, it is true, with much preju- 
dice to-day upon the study of any par- 
ticular religious party, for there are in 
all religious organizations many elements 



6 RELIGION AND LIFE 

which seem to the modern mind patently 
outworn; and yet this very fact should be 
a reason for thoughtful and discriminating 
study. More than ever in a democracy is 
it needful to have men free from all 
gtoss superstitions, to have men and women 
clear-eyed as to causes and effects, and 
trained to reason from effects to causes. 
It is asserted that workingmen deal so 
much with machinery that they no longer 
are tempted to go to magic for an ex- 
planation of the unknown. But is the 
automatism of the machine a true picture 
of our highest life? Is there no reality to 
correspond to the sense of power and self- 
direction that makes a man feel himself 
more than a machine.^ 

If the religious forms of to-day have no 
reality behind them, if the energy and 
life that is now found running in religious 
channels is wasted, then the sooner we 
know it the better. The Socialist party in 
Germany has abandoned official opposition 
to religion on the ground that it is a private 
and personal matter. This may be wise 
from a party standpoint, but, personally, 
the writer feels that no man has a right to 



OUR GENERAL ASSUMPTIONS 7 

a simply negative attitude; either we are 
face to face with a vast delusion that 
holds back the race, or we are in contact 
with a mighty force which we need and 
the cause of progress needs. 

Even when we recognize most freely that 
superstition is mingled with nearly all 
existent religious cults and dogmas, the 
question remains, What gives these super- 
stitions power? And if we set about dis- 
placing the superstitions, we must raise the 
question, Are we giving anything in its 
place? A wooden leg is a poor substitute 
for one of bone and muscle, but to go 
about simply sawing off wooden legs would 
not be a helpful activity. Granting that 
superstition marks much of our religious 
usage, we should try to understand what 
this superstition stands for, and, seeing its 
place in human life, try to discover its 
function and its defects. 

It is a common attitude in France and 
Italy for men to say that religion is "good 
for the women," and while the men ignore 
it and its claims on them personally, they 
insist upon maintaining the forms for the 
sake of the "women and the children." 



8 RELIGION AND LIFE 

Such an attitude cannot be long retained 
while women are daily asserting the essen- 
tial homogeneity of human life. Religion is 
either a force for all or for none. It is 
either true for men and women or false 
for men and women. 

The intelligent man of to-day must try, 
at least, to understand religion. One of 
the ablest of America's Western politicians 
failed utterly to attain his political ambi- 
tions because he entirely misunderstood the 
psychology of the religious community in 
which he worked. While one of the ele- 
ments that made up Lincoln's strength was 
his wonderfully clear comprehension of the 
religious feeling of the common man, and 
his power of appeal, in utterly undogmatic 
forms, to the religious feelings of his 
hearers. 

So that from any point of view the cul- 
tivated man to-day must try to under- 
stand this mighty force which is still 
building temples and churches, still laying 
the foundation for new cultures and new 
states, and which is still the theme upon 
which men ponder most deeply and most 
earnestly, and for which they will make 



OUR GENERAL ASSUMPTIONS 9 

even greater sacrifices than for country 
and home. 

From time to time we hear it said that 
rehgion is dying out, or that this or that 
rehgion is passing, or that reason is taking 
the place of rehgion. Such statements have 
been made at all times, only to find them 
belied by some tremendous uprising such as 
the birth of Christianity itself, or the rise 
of Buddhism, or the religious awakening of 
the Reformation, or the Evangelical re- 
vival. Nor are there any conclusive evi- 
dences to-day that religion is less of a 
force than it ever was. At no time have 
all men been religious, any more than all 
men were musical. There is also a great 
difference in the way the religious life 
manifests its vitality. To a Roman of 
Cicero's time the doubts and negations of 
his day seemed, without any question, irre- 
ligious. We, looking back upon that age, 
realize that Vergil's Epic was a great re^ 
ligious poem marking the rising wave of 
religious feeling, some of whose very ex- 
pressions were the persecutions of rival 
faiths. Nor is it doubtful that the Roman 
empire was in the midst of a great re- 



10 RELIGION AND LIFE 

ligious and ethical revival, the best fruits 
of which were Stoicism, Cynicism, Epi- 
cureanism, Gnosticism, and at last the 
Roman Church. 

There come times in the history of the 
intellectual world when it seems as though 
a particular trend has at last reached 
definite victory; but the shout of triumph is 
hardly still before another wave leaves the 
school mourning its shattered idols. Not 
long ago a rather shallow materialism had 
seemingly taken final possession of the 
great upper middle class of England and 
this country, and just when it had seem- 
ingly become well-nigh hopeless to attempt 
a restatement of religion a great wave of 
transcendental idealism swept over the 
minds of men, and transformed their think- 
ing almost without their consciousness of 
the vast change that was taking place and 
religion came again to its own. 

Many times the passing of religious 
forms has been hailed by the critics of re- 
ligion as a final victory and bewailed by 
its friends as a last signal defeat, only to 
reveal the fact that defeated formality 
made way for larger life, and quickened 



OUR GENERAL ASSUMPTIONS 11 

energies were taking the place of routine 
and stagnation. 

Even were we convinced that what we 
know as reHgion was being really de- 
throned, and other convictions were taking 
its place, we would still have to understand 
religion to understand the past; and his- 
tory would be a strange enigma to any 
man who had lost touch with the tre- 
mendous significance of religion for stormy 
human life. There is, however, no evi- 
dence that will stand investigation that 
religion is being displaced in modern life. 
True it is that old forms give way to new 
expressions, but as a mere force with 
which the historian or the statesman must 
reckon religious feeling is to-day as im- 
portant as it probably ever was in human 
history. To-day in England the leader- 
ship of the new liberal democracy is in 
the hands of men trained in the non- 
conformist churches. Nor can any 
thoughtful student of German social ad- 
vance fail to note a strange but great 
spiritual awakening which, amid many 
differing manifestations, has an underlying 
unity, and which, like great spiritual awak- 



IS RELIGION AND LIFE 

enings before it, is born of the established 
state rehgion, but fails to be recognized by 
the parent church. It is only when the 
various forms under which religion has dis- 
played its energy are too closely identified 
with religion that it seems to many to be 
slipping away. 

Any inquiry into the character and func- 
tion of religion must, however, be upon the 
basis of some understanding of what we 
mean by the word "know." TMiat are 
known in philosophy as the epistomo- 
logical questions must be faced. It is 
fashionable now to say of religion that we 
cannot ''prove" the positions we hold. 
Here, however, it is for us to understand 
what we mean by ''prove." It was once 
fashionable to speak of mathematical cer- 
tainty, and from Spinoza to Leibnitz the 
effort has constantly been made to reduce 
the proofs for the higher values of life to 
mathematical formulae. And in scholastic 
theology, whether in its most consummate 
form in the hands of Thomas Aquinas or 
in the mutilated and dismembered systems 
of Protestant imitators, the forms of syllo- 
gistic thinking have been assumed as 



OUR GENERAL ASSUMPTIONS 13 

methods by which new truth apart from 
experience about God, the soul, and immor- 
taHty may be reached. 

This faith in mathematical certainty is 
based, however, upon a misconception — a 
common misconception — namely, that the 
elaborate science by which we hold to- 
gether and deal with material facts is a 
way of reaching truth apart from ex- 
perience. All mathematics demands is 
absolute self-consistency, and you may 
start with any set of definitions you may 
please. Our senses give us only three di- 
mensions; but if you choose to set out 
with four or five or x dimensions, you can 
build up a mathematics on that basis just 
as well. It is, in fact, a shorthand by 
which we sum up elaborate processes that 
would otherwise baffle us. It enables us to 
deal with vast ranges of experiences, like 
those of astronomy or bridge-building, 
which we could not manage without it. It 
helps us to great generalizations whose ulti- 
mate test, however, must again be ex- 
perience. The sureness of its results 
depends upon the accuracy with which 
we use the definitions and concepts and 



14f RELIGION AND LIFE 

the exactness of our record of the ex- 
periences/ 

These abstractions far surpass our actual 
experiences. We postulate a perfect circle 
or a straight line, although we have never 
seen nor can ever make a perfect circle or a 
straight line. They remain abstract ideals, 
abstractions indeed from actual physical 
experiences, but transcending all individual 
particular experiences. And our place in 
the universe seems marked oflF as over 
against the animal creation by just this 
capacity for ideals whose reality is a 
matter, not of even possible demonstra- 
tion, but of fundamental faith in a reality 
ever becoming. 

To-day we have entered upon a new era 
of experimentation. We test our conclu- 
sions, and by a series of repetitions under 
known conditions establish the chain of 
conditions under which a particular eflFect 



1 At the same time this power of conceptual abstraction, which is the 
basis of language and logic, has value for life only in connection with our 
empiric experiences, and in and of itself can give us no guarantee of the 
empiric existence of the relations it postulates. Thus a mathematical 
Hne is the shortest distance between two points, but we have no empiric 
experience of either a point or a line, and mathematical abstraction can- 
not guarantee to us their empiric reality. This was the weakness of 
Anselm's position in his controversy with Gannilo. 



OUR GENERAL ASSUMPTIONS 15 

takes place. Out of the complexity of life 
we seek to separate happenings, and to 
bring these happenings into relationship 
with each other, and to fix the conditions 
under which certain happenings will always 
take place. Thus we know that hydrogen 
and oxygen may be mingled in certain pro- 
portions, and that if then an electric spark 
be passed through them they will combine 
and two colorless gases become fluid water, 
HaO. So sure are the results of certain 
experiments that we can generalize from 
these experiences, and these generaliza- 
tions we call laws. These generalizations 
may within limits be tested over and over 
again, until the universality and uni- 
formity of the "law" becomes a matter of 
relative certainty. If a new comet appears, 
the assumption will not be doubted by an 
intelligent man that it will act in a certain 
way according to its initial speed, its 
weight, and relation in space to other 
heavenly bodies. We say ''we know" that 
H and O will combine to form water, and 
that attraction is in a certain ratio to the 
square of the distance. 

As once men sought to reduce religion 



16 RELIGION AND LIFE 

and aesthetics and ethics and, indeed, all 
the higher values to mathematical formulae 
in the mistaken assurance that mathemati- 
cal science was a key to all knowledge, so 
to-day the modern scientific experimental 
method is openly proclaimed as the one 
gateway to knowledge. 

Moreover, this claim seems often justi- 
fied by the vast advances it has enabled us 
to make in the mastery of the world about 
us. It has helped us to understand our own 
mental processes and to measure the ma- 
terial world around us. It seems ungrate- 
ful to point out the limitations of a method 
to which we may be said to almost owe our 
modern world. Yet, in point of fact, the 
experimental method has extremely dis- 
tinct and trying limitations. Do what we 
will, the rudeness of our senses, the limits 
of the eye and ear, of taste and touch are 
so marked that even with all possible elimi- 
nation of the personal equation our approach 
to the facts must remain distinctly relative. 

And further, at best only a small part of 
our world of experience can ever be sub- 
jected to any exact experimental method. 
We cannot dogmatically say how far we 



OUR GENERAL ASSUMPTIONS 17 

may yet succeed in extending the experi- 
mental method to regions that now may 
seem beyond its scope, for it would be a 
foolhardy thing to try to-day to fix the 
limits of experimental science or restrict its 
field. We, nevertheless, must realize that 
there are distinct limitations, and that even 
within these we must often be content with 
degrees of assurances ranging from the 
positive conviction that falling bodies in all 
space obey the laws that rule on the earth's 
surface, to the tentative acceptance of the 
somewhat doubtful hypothesis that the 
unit of matter is the electrical ion. 

These limitations are fixed by the fact of 
life's great complexity, and the fact that 
we can theoretically never repeat any 
experience. We can only attempt an ap- 
proximation. The conditions of a simple 
chemical experiment can, for all practical 
purposes, be exactly repeated; but as the 
complexity grows greater and greater we 
must trust to shrewd analogies and gen- 
eralizations on the basis of ever smaller 
areas of experimentation. We can never 
"know" that protection or free trade was 
good or bad for America after the war, for 



18 RELIGION AND LIFE 

no experience can ever be repeated, and 
social experimentation can never repro- 
duce the conditions of any historical 
situation. Conclusive proof cannot be 
forthcoming. It will always be open to 
anyone to "prove" that Napoleon was a 
curse or blessing. We can never experi- 
ment with and without Napoleons under 
the same set of circumstances. The con- 
ditions of social equilibrium can never be 
exactly the same. If, therefore, one means 
by "scientific method" the experimental 
table of the laboratory, the limits are so 
well defined that most of life that is really 
worth while can never be tested by the 
"scientific" method. 

However, experimentation is only one 
feature of the really scientific method of 
to-day. What we really have which sep- 
arates us from the childhood of knowledge 
is some attempt at systematic generaliza- 
tions from observed experiences. We have 
improved the records of experience. We 
have learned to critically estimate all 
records, and in many ways have learned 
to eliminate errors by observation of aver- 
ages. We have improved our sense ex- 



OUR GENERAL ASSUMPTIONS 19 

periences, by exact measurements, longer 
sight, stronger sight, and mechanical meth- 
ods of fixing experiences, as in the photo- 
graph, etc. We have more definite and 
more trustworthy records of the actual 
happenings, and so we can better describe 
or guess at the conditions of a particular 
event. Thus slowly, for instance, we are 
learning to forecast the weather by ob- 
servations of the conditions that have 
governed particular changes in the past, 
and although the complexity and the in- 
stability of the factors with which the 
experts deal are exceedingly great, we yet 
have firm faith that certain very definite 
laws underlie these manifold variations. As 
we watch these variations we are struck 
with the regularity of summer, autumn, 
winter, and spring, and notice how under 
all seeming change they yet succeed each 
other in a certain uniformity. 

This faith in uniformity can never be 
the result of an all-inclusive experience. 
Gravitation might cease to act in the same 
ratio of distance. Bichlorid of mercury 
might become a wholesome article of food. 
But, in actuality, a systematization of 



W RELIGION AND LIFE 

experiences far short of inclusiveness is 
sufficient to convince us of the truth of 
our generalizations. In fact, the danger is 
the other way. We are incHned to accept 
a generalization as true on far too small a 
range of experience. 

The great value of the experiment is the 
facility it gives for repeating under known 
conditions our experiences, and the as- 
surance that comes from experimentation, 
prediction, and fulfillment of the predic- 
tion is very great. At the same time the 
complexity and individual character of our 
higher values, and the subtle changes that 
take place below the range of our exactest 
observation, force on us the real crudeness 
of all our most scientific work. Take, for 
instance, the baffling character of the finer 
appeals to our sense of taste. No one 
knows what are the subtle conditions that 
make certain wines agreeable to the trained 
palate. It depends, no doubt, upon slight 
but marked characteristics in the yeasts 
and fermentation processes, but no chem- 
istry can describe what the tongue in- 
stantly recognizes. The photographic plate 
in its exposure, development, and fixing 



OUR GENERAL ASSUMPTIONS 21 

represents an elaborate and well-understood 
chemical history, but no science is exact 
enough to quite predict the curious indi- 
vidual characteristics that occasionally 
mark plates off from each other, though, 
as far as human skill can go, they are 
subjected to the same treatment. 

In other words, the splendid usefulness of 
the experimental method should not blind 
us to the fact that a vast range of ex- 
perience and assurance lies wholly beyond 
its scope. The demand, therefore, that 
our religious assurance rest upon the same 
plane with assurances born of the experi- 
mental laboratory, or that finally religion 
must stand the laboratory test, is one of the 
errors which, like the error in regard to 
mathematics, confuse us, not only in the 
realm of religion, but of nearly all the 
higher values and the more subtle and 
complex experiences. 

It is not that there is a sharp line drawn 
between '^reason" and *'faith," but simply 
that a vast range of life is in varied degree 
beyond the scope of certain well-defined 
and highly useful modes of thought, and 
that neither the method of mathematics. 



22 RELIGION AND LIFE 

nor yet that of experimentation, does more 
than help us organize and control our 
experiences. 

We all have experiences and assurances 
quite beyond the reach of mathematical 
description or experimental test. The per- 
sonal judgments as to literature, art; the 
personal life in its complex affections and 
distastes; the psychic reactions whose com- 
plexity makes it impossible often to say 
whether one man is normal and another 
insane or not: all these judgments rest, not 
on some foundationless emotionalism, nor 
still less upon authority external to the 
experiencing mind, but upon a long his- 
torical, social, and individual experience 
that in its complexity and profundity 
baffles all complete analysis. 

It is this complexity that has led men to 
say of religion that it is a matter of emotional 
reaction, or deals with things that "can- 
not be proved." It is true that religion 
involves emotional reaction, but it also de- 
mands intelligence and appeals to the will. 
In fact, as in the case of all the higher and 
more complex values, its tests are the 
reaction of the whole personal life, and, 



OUR GENERAL ASSUMPTIONS 2S 

indeed, of the whole social life. Nor can it 
be "proved" in the same sense that we can 
check a balance sheet, or find out whether 
there is carbon dioxyde in the atmosphere, 
but neither can we "prove" the high value 
of Wagner's "Parsifal" or the ideal value 
of democracy. Not even the common con- 
sent of all the rest of mankind would 
convince some of us that despotism was a 
better form of government than democracy, 
but the way we approach the question as 
to the "truth" of democracy, that is, its 
real inward value, is exactly the method of 
approach for testing the truth or inner 
value of religion. 

A scientific method in examining reli- 
gion will therefore avail itself of all possible 
tests of truth. We will try to objectively 
study and weigh history, to master as far 
as possible the psychology of the religious 
reaction, to understand amid the com- 
plexity of its character the various ele- 
ments that constitute religion both in its 
inner life and its outward manifestations. 
And in judging religious values there can be 
but one final test, namely, their ethical out- 
come. Not, indeed, that religion is "sim- 



24 RELIGION AND LIFE 

ply" ethics, or that ethics is the whole of 
religion, but because conduct and life are 
the only objective tests which can reveal 
to us the inner meaning of religious reac- 
tions. In the long run the ultimate test 
mankind will apply to the various religious 
forms and claims will be the outcome in 
personal and social character. And this test 
is being constantly made. 

The difficulty of applying this test is 
exceedingly great. All manner of elements 
enter into social and personal character — 
heredity, climate, economic level, class at- 
mosphere, political color, and other even 
more subtle factors; and yet, looking over 
the history of the race, it is certainly as yet 
impossible to point to any one factor of 
greater importance than the religious be- 
liefs and the religious reactions of history. 
A really scientific study of the fundamen- 
tals of religion must carry us far back into 
the early history of the race, for it is linked 
with the oldest chapters in man's long 
story. Evil elements mingle freely with 
the better things, and the student of re- 
ligion must be clear-eyed enough to search 
resolutely for the good, and brave enough 



OUR GENERAL ASSUMPTIONS 25 

to recognize and reject the weaker and 
debasing part. 

Any inquiry into religion sooner or 
later will deal with two important phases 
of the question: first, What is the func- 
tion of religion as seen in its past history? 
and, secondly, What is the inner con- 
tent of religion as it may now have value 
for us? 



THE LITERATURE 

The first part of our discussion has dealt with 
our theory of knowledge, and the student who 
desires to go more thoroughly into this will have 
to begin with Hume's "Treatise of Human Nature," 
and go thence to the "Critique of Pure Reason," 
by Kant (Max Miiller's translation), and to Lotze's 
"Microcosmos" (English translation). Compare 
also with these J. S. Mill's "Logic" and Sigwart's 
"Logik" (German, in two volumes), Karl Pearson's 
"The Grammar of Science," and the literature 
there given. For the more special field of the 
philosophy of religion an admirable work is that 
of HoefTding, "Philosophy of Religion" (English and 
German translations). Compare also Otto Pfieid- 
erer's Gifford Lectures on the "Philosophy and 
Development of Religion," 1894. A fine bibliog- 
raphy of the field up to the date of its publication 



26 RELIGION AND LIFE 

is in Jastrow's excellent "Study of Religion." Too 
little known are the fine treatments in somewhat 
poetical form of the field by Fechner, "Die Tages- 
ansicht gegenueber der Nachtansicht" (compare 
especially pages 3 to 64. Only in German). Compare 
also Rudolph Eucken's "Problems of Human Life." 



CHAPTER II 

Primitive Religion 

The fruitless discussion as to whether 
any human tribes had no notion of a God 
had interest only as long as men still de- 
fended the existence of God on the ground 
of some universal tradition. But it is now 
fairly well established that some sort of 
religion has been the possession of man- 
kind from the earliest times, though how 
far linked with any notion of one personal 
being is another question, which is also of 
little importance. Nor is it safe with our 
present data to dogmatize on the origin 
of the religious beliefs. That dreams and 
ancestor-worship affect the forms of re- 
ligion may be easily granted, but Herbert 
Spencer's over-emphasis of these factors 
may be now admitted, and they certainly 
do not give us the origin of religion. 

Religion is essentially a certain attitude 
most characteristically called out in the 
presence of the mysterious, and the sudden 
change from life to death is the most mys- 

27 



28 RELIGION AND LIFE 

terious fact with which the thinking mind 
is early confronted. Its tragic meaning 
must force itself at times even upon the 
dullest and most indifferent of even very 
low grades of human intelligence. Nor is 
it possible for any of us to interpret life 
about us except in the terms and symbols 
borrowed from our own experience. That 
men, therefore, should dimly attribute to 
all objects, including animals, something of 
their own experienced psychic life was in- 
evitable, so that the animism of Comte and 
Tylor may be assumed as an almost uni- 
versal experience. Thus children strike the 
"naughty'' tree against which they have 
hurt themselves, and savages thankfully 
worship the clouds that bring them the 
needed rain. On this basis religion may 
have grown and developed, but we are 
still as far as ever from a satisfactory 
analysis of the psychic attitude of reverend 
relationship to superior power, which in 
various degrees and under various forms 
marks human life at all the stages we can 
examine. 

The study of the religion of primitive 
men from watching existing savages labors 



PRIMITIVE RELIGION 29 

under the disadvantage that we are ig- 
norant as to whether existing savages are 
degenerate survivals of higher cultures, 
which seems in some instances certainly 
to be the case, or whether they may not be 
cases of arrested development. In either 
case the picture of primitive religious man- 
kind drawn from savagery will be in- 
complete. At the same time it is possible 
broadly to sketch the religious attitude of 
earlier humanity. As Robertson Smith has 
made clear, it was essentially a group 
attitude. Unauthorized non-group religion 
became magic, and was generally soon con- 
demned and dreaded. The primitive reli- 
gion expressed itself in various cults and 
then became the fixed and stable elements, 
not only of the religious, but of the whole 
group life. The attitude toward certain 
objects and events becomes a special one. 
These objects and events, these times and 
places, become "sacred." The two sides of 
this attitude are represented in modern 
discussions by words taken from the Poly- 
nesian, namely, mdna and taboo, Mana is, 
on the whole, the positive, and taboo the 
negative aspect of this sacredness; and the 



80 RELIGION AND LIFE 

whole of savage life is more or less lived 
under the steady pressure of these con- 
ceptions. All important activities are 
dominated by the sense of mdna and 
taboo. There are life-giving energies, and 
there are sources of power open to human 
life when the mdna conditions are fulfilled, 
and there are times and places, as well as 
objects, so sacred that they are taboo, and 
are either to be altogether avoided or to be 
met by the conditions of taboo. 

Thus the discovery of these conditions 
links religion with all knowledge, tradition, 
and custom. Primitive religion covers the 
whole of life. The hunt, the feast, the 
coming to maturity of the child, the coun- 
cil, the war, the movement from place to 
place are all conditioned by the ever- 
present mdna and taboo. The embodied 
traditions of the group in the aged or the 
chief, or, later on, in the priest, and hard- 
ened more or less in cult, ritual, and belief, 
controls the activity of the savage from 
infancy to death. He has no standards 
for truth other than the age of the tradi- 
tion or the universal acceptance of it by 
those about him. 



PRIMITIVE RELIGION 31 

Thus it comes about that sooner or later 
the whole religious life is brought under a 
social type, and other personal relations to 
the unseen powers become limited to magic, 
sorcery, and witchcraft, which in varied 
degrees are then under suspicion, and in 
advanced group life are forbidden in the 
interest of the social bond; for religion 
reaches from the smallest group, founded 
either on kindred or industry, to encompass 
the larger and larger groups which become 
tribes and nations; and as it teaches these 
it becomes the bond which unites the 
nation's life. We see the process among 
the Seven Nations, or Indian Confederacy, 
and quite plainly in the Amphyctionic 
Council of the twelve Greek tribes about 
Delphi; and later the Union of the Hellenes 
in the peace and games of the Olympic 
feasts. 

This union in religion brings about per- 
secution of opposing cults, and particularly 
persecution of any divisive personal reli- 
gious practices. At the same time con- 
quered tribes bring in their gods and 
usages in some sort of subordination to 
the gods of the conquerors, and a Pan- 



32 RELIGION AND LIFE 

theon arises with combinations of religious 
rites and cults. Thus the including of 
other religions enabled the Romans to hold 
a world together without too great a sur- 
render on the part of the conquered of 
their own national and religious life. This 
is a very vital use of the elasticity that 
polytheism gave. It enabled the con- 
queror to use the multitude of gods for a 
social purpose. Thus increasingly religion 
becomes the social bond. 

The outward forms of this primitive 
group religion will depend upon several 
factors. On the one hand, the cultural 
stage determines the character of the 
spirits worshiped. The forest tribe will 
worship tree-gods, the roving huntsman or 
pastoral nomad will have sacred places, 
but can hardly erect temples or carry 
about with him any elaborate idols or 
cumbersome apparatus of worship. The 
myths and rites of a fisher folk will reflect 
the needs and life of the worshiping tribe, 
and as mankind moves upward it carries 
with it the memory of various stages 
through which its life has passed. For the 
social significance of primitive religion as a 



PRIMITIVE RELIGION 33 

bond of union presupposes a certain con- 
servative character. Thus reUgious rites 
preserve the stone knife for sacrifice long 
after metal has taken the place of stone 
in all other activities of life. The real 
meaning of some religious usage is often 
entirely lost, but the usage persists and 
exerts a peculiar fascination because linked 
with the memories of so many generations. 
Thus when the tribal fire was all im- 
portant, because if it went out savagery 
had no means of reproducing it, it became 
a religious function to maintain the fire, 
and we have vestal virgins, or the eternal 
fire upon the altar of Christian churches, 
although the real significance has been 
altogether forgotten. 

The presence of the mysterious cycle of 
the seasons soon impresses mankind; and 
even if Frazer exaggerates somewhat the 
universal season myths in their significance 
for religion, and often puts the cart before 
the horse, yet it is his distinguished service 
to have pointed out the wide prevalence of 
such an underlying current of feeling. The 
stage of culture must, however, be some- 
what advanced. Myths are more generally, 



34 RELIGION AND LIFE 

perhaps, attempted explanations of cus- 
toms whose real significance has been for- 
gotten than the foundation of religious 
rites and cults. But the cycle of the sea- 
sons had early significance for the race, 
whether hunting or fishing or engaged in 
primitive agriculture. Moreover, the re- 
turn of the seasons has ever something ir- 
regular and mysterious about it, and the 
mind of primitive man was perhaps even 
more impressed by this irregular and 
strange character than even by the regular 
cycle that underlies all the minor irregu- 
larities. These were, however, the occasion 
of returning rites and ceremonies. The 
hopes of spring and the joys of autumn are 
linked with myth and story and celebrated 
in religious dancing and feasting. Then, also, 
religion tries to control the seasons and to 
temper the heat of summer and the cold of 
winter, to induce rain to fall and increase the 
fruitfulness of the earth. In an ever-increas- 
ing measure men began to observe the forces 
of nature and to identify them with the 
divine power or powers by which man felt 
his life surrounded, and upon which, in his 
weakness, he felt himself dependent. 



PRIMITIVE RELIGION 35 

When, then, a Pantheon arises through 
the amalgamation of tribes, however 
brought about, it is easy to see how the 
tribe of greatest strength should give the 
leading god in the Pantheon. Nor is it 
diflSeult to see how the other gods should 
assume functions linked with the various 
activities of the other assimilated tribes. 
Thus as the Greeks take over Astarte 
from the seafaring Phoenicians, she rises 
from the sea and becomes with Poseidon 
one of a cycle by which a roving inland 
tribe recognizes a change in habit as the 
Greeks become, in part at least, a sea- 
faring people. 

These vegetative and astronomical cycles 
are linked with man's earliest attempts at 
systematic knowledge, for it becomes in- 
cumbent upon the tribal group to under- 
stand the mind and will of the powers 
upon which it depends. Thus astronomy 
rises out of astrology and religious rites 
attend all the increasingly complicated ac- 
tivities of agriculture. In the most primi- 
tive mythologies we have history, philos- 
ophy, and science blended together in 
rude unorganized beginnings. Science is 



36 RELIGION AND LIFE 

man*s experience organized, and systema- 
tized, and constantly subjected to critical 
tests to eliminate error in generalization 
and to build up farther hypothetical postu- 
lates for the farther systematization. The 
rude beginnings of this process are seen in 
the fable, story, and myth of early religion. 
Here, again, Hesiod, Homer, the Vedic 
hymns, and parts of the Old Testament 
represent an exceedingly advanced stage of 
this process. But in all of these books we 
see the primitive material which represents 
much more simple strata of thought. 
The most primitive cosmogony is still an 
attempt at systematic knowledge. The 
element of wild speculation is overwhelm- 
ing and observation is rude and uncritical, 
yet both elements are there, and must 
always be present in any attempt at 
constructive thinking. It may seem a 
long way from the weird mythologies that 
cluster about the round of spring and 
autumn or the astronomical cycle, to the 
work of Darwin and Helmholz, but the 
interests are not so far apart. Under both 
is the overwhelming longing to know and 
to master our world through knowledge. 



PRIMITIVE RELIGION 3T 

The rude beginnings of all science are 
found in the attempted cosmogonies with 
which nearly all advanced religions begin. 

Thus also art, architecture, music, the 
dance, all bear the marks of the religious 
character of all activity at a certain stage 
of human life. The temple, as the house 
of the god, gives the largest and grandest 
forms which the tribal mind can create 
and furnishes room for development; and, 
in turn, down to our own day marks, as in 
the colonial style, the more imposing pri- 
vate dwellings. Music in both its rhythm 
and harmony reflects in most interesting 
details its development from religious 
chants and processional marches. The 
slow beat of the Gregorian chant echoes in 
the music dramas of Wagner, while the 
wild religious dances of southern lands may 
still in mystic sensuousness be heard in 
the operas of Italy. Nor is it otherwise 
with painting, poetry, and oratory; all 
bear the traces of the tribal religious life 
in which they were nurtured, and to which 
they still minister even if in other ways 
and different measure. 

That intelligent men should therefore 



38 RELIGION AND LIFE 

neglect the study of the significance of 
rehgion, or misinterpret it in the way so 
often fashionable, is a bar to any real 
understanding of man's past, which has 
been steeped in religious faiths, hopes, 
and fears, so far as we can see, from the 
dawn of human intelligence. 



THE LITERATURE 

Admirable is still Tylor's "Primitive Culture." 
Compare with this Frazier's "Golden Bough" and 
Robertson Smith's "Rehgion of the Semites." See 
also Morgan's "Ancient Society." In Herbert 
Spencer's "Synthetic Philosophy" much data are 
given, to be used, however, with care. Colhn's 
"Epitome" is an authorized guide to the phi- 
losophy. For the special study of Greek Religion 
see Mahaffy's books, and particularly his "History 
of Classical Literature." But especially consult 
Rhode's "Psyche" (German, 1907) and his chapter 
in the second volume of "Kleine Schriften" on 
"Die Religion der Griechen" (German, 1902). Also 
"Kultur der Gegenwart" Teil I, Abteilung viii, 
pages 1 to 290. For primitive mentaHty, compare 
Franz Boaz's "The INIind of Primitive Man." 



CHxiPTER III 

The Twofold Interest 

It may be assumed that the opinion 
once widely popular that religions are the 
invention of power-loving priests needs 
no elaborate refutation. The priest is, in 
fact, a rather late product of religious 
organization, and reveals in his great va- 
riety of character the uncertainty of his 
origin, for religious organization is itself 
late, and its beginnings are often exceed- 
ingly difficult to satisfactorily trace. The 
early forms of organization are tribal or 
national, and any differentiation between 
a natural group and a religious group 
may be taken at once as proof of an elabo- 
rate culture and an advanced life. 

But there are distinctly two types of 
religious interest which mingle indeed one 
with another in the most strange com- 
binations, but are apparent the moment 
religion emerges from the most simple and 
undeveloped form to anything like an 
organized whole. 

39 



40 RELIGION AND LIFE 

These two interests may perhaps best be 
treated as the "priestly interest and the 
prophetic interest. However much they 
blend and mingle, and however diflScuIt it 
may be from time to time to separate 
them in a stream full of eddies and cross 
currents, it is, nevertheless, apparent in 
any general view that these two interests 
are not only often quite distinct, but even 
at times mutually hostile. 

Nor is it possible to say that one is 
older or more fundamental than the other. 
Both interests are found present as soon as 
anything that can be called religion at all 
can be observed. And both interests per- 
sist as long as religion persists. The stage 
of development differs, of course, most 
widely. The priestly interest does not 
develop a priestly caste or even a distinct 
priestly function until quite late. And 
often at all stages of culture we find both 
interests represented in the activities of 
one man or set of men. Then, again, at 
any time one interest may so dominate as 
to almost entirely obscure the other. More 
especially is this the case when the priestly 
interest has a highly developed life, and 



THE TWOFOLD INTEREST 41 

finds that life seemingly threatened by the 
fervors of the prophetic interest. It is, 
therefore, of very real importance to get a 
clear conception of the two interests, and 
to sympathetically consider the deeper sig- 
nificance they possess. 

The priestly interest represents in large 
measure the continuity of the tribal re- 
ligious tradition, or, indeed, as all tradi- 
tions are more or less linked with religion, 
the continuity of the tribal life. And 
the historical importance of this con- 
tinuity needs no argument. The little 
child so long as the cortex of the brain is 
undevoloped in its texture is weary in 
a few minutes of any sustained activity. 
The little one will run all day if healthy 
and well fed, but a steady walk of an hour 
or two will tire the undeveloped child as 
eight hours' running and jumping "on the 
impulse of the moment" will not do. The 
undeveloped man is in some respects like 
the child at this point. Continuity and 
fixedness of purpose, the power of steady, 
dogged following up of a social or tribal 
plan, is conspicuously lacking. And here 
the priestly interest in a steady and con- 



42 RELIGION AND LIFE 

tinuous tradition has a social and political 
significance of the very first character. It 
is a powerfully cohesive force that not 
only binds the group together, but binds 
generations to generations, thus giving sta- 
bility and rigidity to the group purpose as 
it is passed from one age to another. This 
is intensely interesting in its merely bio- 
logical effect. Other factors enter in, no 
doubt, but a priestly religious interest 
has historically been linked with the most 
persistent group traditions we know. Thus, 
for instance, Judaism, without geographical 
boundaries, without unity of actual spoken 
dialect, with but doubtful racial unity, has 
survived on the basis of a rigid priestly 
group tradition centering about the syna- 
gogue and organized in the law and the 
commentaries gathered about the law, 
while civilizations that for the moment 
seemed vastly more favorably situated for 
survival have gone down in the shocks of 
struggle for existence and overlordship. 

The conservative function of the priestly 
interest is seen in the mass of traditions of 
all kinds about which it throws the char- 
acter of "sacredness," and thus saves them 



THE TWOFOLD INTEREST 43 

amid the wandering miseellaneousness of a 
primitive or undeveloped intelligence. The 
literature called the Talmud represents on 
a very high plane what on much lower 
levels of intelligence and culture the priestly 
interest is constantly doing. Thus in 
Egypt and Babylon rise great priestly 
states on the basis of a group tradition 
that conserves the life and fixes the pur- 
pose of the tribe or nation. Thus also in 
China the priestly religious interest throws 
about the family and the ancestral mem- 
ory a sacredness that renders the life rigid 
and tenacious to an extent still the marvel 
of every observer. 

One of the obvious effects of this priestly 
interest is an element of order and sequence 
which it brings into the life. Life is sur- 
rounded by ritual and cult. The wander- 
ing attention is trained to greater automatic 
precision. The destructive individualisms 
of an immature group life are controlled by 
the bonds of an inherited order, and when 
family discipline in the narrower sense 
ceases the group tradition takes up the 
task of ordering the individual life. This 
process has many sides, but no one aspect 



44 RELIGION AND LIFE 

is of greater importance than the religious 
priestly tradition. So, for instance, nearly 
all that is highest and noblest in Greek art 
was worked out under the influence of a 
religious tradition that handed down as 
^'sacred" the body of experience gained in 
Egypt and in Crete during the long periods 
of the Minoan and Mycensean ages. No 
other interest has had anything like the 
conserving force of this priestly interest. 
It is, of course, often uncritical, but the 
experiences thus uncritically conserved form 
in nearly every instance the groundwork 
upon which historical science must build. 
Practically all primitive traditions are re- 
ligious traditions, and practically all primi- 
tive literature and all early documents 
have been conserved to us by the priestly 
religious interest. 

Moreover, the ordering of the rhythm of 
the personal and group life has been largely 
the work of this priestly religious interest. 
In the animal stage of life this rhythm is 
controlled by the outward forces of nature. 
Spring and summer, autumn and winter 
determine together with night and day the 
main rhythms of the less developed crea- 



THE TWOFOLD INTEREST 45 

tures. As man advances in his mastery 
over the forces of nature he is exposed to 
dangers of irregularity and excess which 
are impossible to animals in the bonds of 
external forces. He can warm himself in 
winter and preserve food; he can light the 
night and greatly extend his area of wan- 
dering. It was therefore a service of first- 
rate importance when the priestly reli- 
gious tradition flung over the rhythm of 
the personal life the character of ''sacred- 
ness" and began to control the life by 
giving it internal motives to regularity. 
Thus puberty, marriage, childbirth, ad- 
vancement in rank, and funeral rites, all 
are ordered by the religious tradition and 
surrounded by cult acts expressive of this 
sacredness. And even the day is divided 
by hours of prayer, by sacrificial prayers 
at meals, and by religious interruptions of 
one kind and another. In nones and ves- 
pers, the Mohammedan calls to prayers, 
the evangelical family prayers and grace 
before meat, as well as the Sundays and 
Sabbaths with their ordered religious ex- 
ercises, we see this priestly instinct still 
striving to introduce, often to its great ad- 



46 RELIGION AND LIFE 

vantage, a routine and steadiness into life. 
And this order and routine it stamps with 
its sacredness and thus gives it a place no 
other motive has been strong enough to 
give it in the Kfe of the individual. 

The same influence orders the life of the 
group. Festivals and religious days, cere- 
monial repetitions all divide and control 
the primitive group life, and give it in cult 
and ritual the steadiness of outward regu- 
lation maintained by inner motives of 
assent. 

The misapprehension is widespread that 
religion is the child of fear. It is no more 
the child of fear than the child of joy. 
Fear has its place. The gods of other 
groups are feared and hated. But the god 
of the group is a protector and friend. 
The religion of early mankind is full of joy 
and feasting. Dancing, music, and elabo- 
rate decoration express the joyous excite- 
ment of special religious occasions. Even 
the worship of Astarte and Aphrodite, that 
seems to us in many ways revolting and 
irreligious, was originally the consecration 
to religion of the highest joy of the senses 
which man could feel. The mingling of 



THE TWOFOLD INTEREST 47 

fear with reverence and worship is natural, 
but it is, on the other hand, quite re- 
markable how religious joy is the marked 
feature of so much primitive religious life. 
All the earlier Jewish feasts were ones of 
joy and triumph. Christmas, Easter, and 
the harvest festivals have their place in 
analogous customs in all primitive reli- 
gions, and are all feasts of joy and 
thanksgiving. 

It is also exceedingly important to study 
the place the priestly religious tradition has 
in the educational system. Down to our 
own day the character of ''sacredness" has 
never been wholly taken away from edu- 
cation. The Mohammedan university is 
still a religious school. The Jewish edu- 
cation is still linked with the synagogue 
and sacred books. The modern university 
has all manner of reminders still of its 
former character as a place where the 
priestly tradition raised up priestly leaders 
and studied and organized the cult and the 
religious ritual of the group life. 

Primitive education consisted largely in 
the preparation for and initiation into 
the separate activities of life. To this day 



48 RELIGION AND LIFE 

education ends in some climax, "gradua- 
tion," or "degree." In all the initiation 
ceremonies the priestly religious tradition 
is present, imparting sacredness to the 
process and heightening its significance by 
its recognition. The earliest documents 
are directly the work of priests, the earliest 
writings are the "hieroglyphic" or priestly 
writings, and far down into the Middle 
Ages of our own era the only ones who 
could write were the "clerics." When, 
therefore, anyone wanted to learn, he had 
to go to the priestly tradition for instruc- 
tion, and generally in some way gain its 
recognition before being generally con- 
sidered as being "learned." This wonderful 
social service of the priestly religious tradi- 
tion is now often ignored or misrepresented, 
because at a certain stage priestly con- 
servatism may lead to the hardening of the 
tradition into a lifeless form, thus inter- 
fering with intellectual progress. But the 
fact that the priestly interest over- 
functions should not blind us to the fact 
that to it we owe the conservation of 
nearly all our educational traditions. It 
has conserved many useless and even 



THE TWOFOLD INTEREST 49 

harmful things, but without it we should 
have had very Httle to conserve. This 
priestly interest in education has often 
degenerated into a selfish and obstructive 
ecclesiasticism ; at the same time it is 
exceedingly ill-informed and unsympathetic 
criticism that cannot distinguish between 
the two elements in the historical de- 
velopment. 

The conservation of man's slow ac- 
quirements from generation to generation, 
the gradual formation of a code of morals, 
the transmission of noble and refining tra- 
ditions, the stern suppression of unsocial 
individualism has been the function almost 
wholly of this priestly interest in the past, 
flinging the mantle of sacredness over the 
group life in its more stable forms. It is 
true that on low levels of culture etiquette, 
that is, the ceremonial, relationships quite 
apart from any inward moral attitude form 
the main interest. Outward correctness is 
the leading emphasis, and with minute 
care the priestly interest seeks to establish 
and maintain outward conformity to the 
body of teachings which is passed down 
from generation to generation. 



50 RELIGION AND LIFE 

This body of etiquette is older than any 
systematic formulation of ethics. Only later 
does the moral attitude arise out of these 
ceremonial conformities, and though the 
conceptions of ''ought" and "ought not" 
have baffled us in final analysis, it is easy 
to see that morality arose on the basis of 
priestly prohibitions. This or that was 
taboo, and the categorical imperative was in 
its earliest form a strong "Thou shalt not!" 

The child not only has no organized 
system of inhibitions, it has almost no 
place for inward inhibitions. These must 
come first from without. "Don't do that!" 
is the constant cry to the growing little 
one. By investing these inhibitions with 
sacredness the priestly interest tends stead- 
ily to render the life of child or group 
autonomous. The inhibition becomes an 
inward one, the recoil from certain lines of 
conduct becomes a second nature. 

It is true that it is a superficial analysis 
that jumps from these "habits" to moral- 
ity, as though from unmoral habits 
morality must proceed. At the same time 
we have, undoubtedly, the basis for the 
outward foundation of morality, and fail 



THE TWOFOLD INTEREST 51 

only to be able to satisfactorily trace the 
moral will to the unmoral mechanism. 
Thus, to borrow a term from another 
science, the priestly interest represents the 
anabolic^ element in the group life. And 
herein lies its danger when in the group 
life this priestly interest overf unctions. 

And this overfunctioning is, unfortu- 
nately, a common phenomenon. By ne- 
cessity the priestly function is exercised by 
those with some claim to authority. The 
father or the mother, the older son or the 
clever and retentive mind within the group 
becomes established as the traditional 
source of religious authority. The func- 
tion of such authority, being mainly to 
conserve the past, becomes sacro-sanct. 
All innovation becomes easily an attack 
upon the sacredness of the tribal life. 
Conservation becomes the end rather than 
a means to an end, and a deathlike rigidity 
may take the place of life and movement. 
Examples are seen in China and Egypt 



^The physiologist speaks of the metabolis of the cell with its two as- 
pects, that of catabilis, or breaking down of the cell tissue, and the build- 
ing up, or anabolic conserving process due to the blood flow. Compare 
Professor Max Verwom's article, "Physiology," in the EnoyolopsBdla 
Britannica, eleventh edition. 



52 RELIGION AND LIFE 

and in the Levitical development of the 
Old Testament. 

Moreover, the attention is mainly ar- 
rested by the outward and the formal. 
Outward conformity is more demanded 
than any inward life, and thus the priestly 
interest values detail and minute con- 
formity as evidences of real religious in- 
terest, and legalism and formalism soon 
curse the whole religiosity fostered by the 
priestly interest when left unbalanced. To 
maintain this conformity authority is 
needed, and the priestly interest grasps 
easily after power, and readily becomes an 
autocratic and aristocratic leadership. Or, 
to maintain the old ways and traditions, it 
is wont to court the forces that have also 
an interest in the maintenance of the 
status quo; thus it becomes, not only 
tyrannical, but, alas, often the protector 
of tyranny under the guise of religious 
conservatism, and with an honest interest 
simply in the maintenance of things as 
they are. Practically all developed priest- 
hoods, wherever they are found, whether 
in primitive religion or in modern Protes- 
tantism, are tory and reactionary, for 



THE TWOFOLD INTEREST 53 

conservation has been the function of the 
priestly interest so long that it almost 
inevitably overfunetions, and thus brings 
upon religion the reproach of being non- 
progressive and antagonistic to new cur- 
rents of feeling, thought, and action. 

For the same reason the priestly interest 
is nearly always afraid. It is forever timid 
in the midst of life's unceasing change. 
Rightly it sees that mere change is not 
always for the better, and readily it be- 
lieves that therefore all change is for the 
worse. It clings with at times pathetic 
and at times provoking tenacity to quite 
unimportant and long-lost positions, and 
every new movement in the world's life 
seems dangerous just because it is new. 

The dangers that beset its ethics are 
formality, externality, and narrowness of 
vision. Large interests are overborne by 
small but intense affections for detail. 
Stagnation and hypocrisy are the constant 
reproaches that may be brought against 
it. And as these things flourish in the last 
stages of any era dominated by an or- 
ganized priestly interest, the real services 
of the past — its great organizing power, its 



54 RELIGION AND LIFE 

faithful conservation of great traditions, 
its leadership in education, and its advo- 
cacy of order and morality — are apt to be 
forgotten in the impatience and anger with 
which at last it is almost sure to be swept 
away by a tide of life it is too weak to 
withstand and too old and senile to enter 
upon anew. 

True it is that the priestly interest is 
likely to be formulated in a caste in only 
late periods of culture, though sometimes it 
exists very strongly entrenched but with a 
comparatively weak development of the 
priest as such, as we see in China. Again, 
it may become so identified with a trium- 
phant ruling class, as in India, that the 
distinctively religious interest is almost 
forgotten. And everywhere it has to con- 
tend, not only with the forces of dis- 
integration, but also with those of progress, 
and it is itself subject to great divisions 
because it is so difiicult to hold traditions 
unchanged, and yet each difference is likely 
to call out the priestly zeal to its special 
maintenance. 

When also this interest does form a 
caste it is likely to be arrogant and mas- 



THE TWOFOLD INTEREST 65 

terful to the point of the loss of all really 
religious influence, because it asserts itself 
in the place of the gods, and then no 
trickery or imposture has been too base to 
maintain the caste. Hence priestly trick- 
ery disgraces the religious development of 
nearly all lands where it has successfully 
grasped after power, and the feeling that 
the end justifies the means, and that evil 
may be done that good may come, has 
often clouded the services of this type of 
religious leadership. 



THE LITERATURE 

For the literature here see the general literature 
dealing with the priestly and prophetic elements 
in the Old Testament, as, for instance, Driver's 
"Introduction to the Old Testament," or Cornill's 
"The Prophets of the Old Testament." Compare 
also Kuenen's "National Religion and World Re- 
ligion." See also the articles in the Encyclopedia 
Biblica, and in Hastings's Bible Dictionary on 
"Prophet" and "Priest." For criticism, see the 
really unbalanced attack by Draper in his "History 
of the Conflict between Religion and Science" and 
the far saner book by Andrew D. White, "The 
Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom." 
Compare also the attitude of Herbert Spencer. 



CHAPTER IV 

The Prophetic Interest 

As far back as we can go we find linked 
with the priestly interest another and 
different spirit in the religious leadership 
of the race. Like the priestly interest, it 
is rather in the beginning an emphasis in 
the religious life than an interest apart. 
Moreover, it is even less likely than the 
priestly interest to formulate itself in a 
class or caste. Its history leads us back 
into the same world of undifferentiated 
groping after the meaning of life and 
death. For convenience we call this in- 
terest the prophetic type. The beginnings 
are very lowly. Fundamentally, it is 
rooted in the faith men have in the ab- 
normal insight of specially gifted fellow 
men. This prophetic insight in later stages 
may be heightened or superinduced by 
various means; and these means Hnk its 
life at several points to the priestly in- 
terest. Nevertheless, it is often at odds 
with the more static priestly leadership. 

56 



THE PROPHETIC INTEREST 57 

Drugs, dances, music, and all the primi- 
tive approaches to hypnotism and auto- 
suggestion play at one stage or another a 
marked role in the prophetic type of re- 
ligious development. Thus it happens 
that so far as these things are under the 
control of the priestly interest the pro- 
phetic is often merged in the priestly or 
springs out of it. 

Thus the prophet of the Old Testa- 
ment in the early stages is a dancing 
dervish, who dances before the ark, and 
the "priests" of Baal dance, cry, and cut 
themselves with knives in the effort 
to control divinity. Soon, however, the 
exceptional and abnormal character of 
the prophet separates him from the priestly 
interest, and, to again borrow a phrase 
from another science, his catabolic ten- 
dency reveals itself. For the prophetic 
interest is apt to be intensely individual. 
The superior insight makes the prophet a 
being apart. He is to some degree normally 
at war with the existing situation, and sees 
beyond the present to the next step to be 
taken. So that even when he proclaims 
the past as an ideal to be regained, it is an 



58 RELIGION AND LIFE 

idealized past and is in reality a new and 
unexperienced situation. 

The priestly and prophetic interests may 
be emphases in the same human life, or 
even in religious classes and castes, but 
the prophetic interest is then almost sure 
to be swallowed up in the more conserva- 
tive and static life. The monastic de- 
velopment has always been essentially pro- 
phetic in its origin, but soon passes from 
this progressive and critical stage to ac- 
ceptance of what is substantially a priestly 
routine and sinks to the level of the static 
priestliness. 

The great services of the prophet lie 
along the line of his religious genius. He 
it is that formulates the new message, and 
when it has been accepted and become the 
rule of the group it is generally forgotten 
how novel the message was. Confucius was 
essentially a prophet, but Confucianism has 
become to the last degree priestly. 

His function is, however, in the first 
instance disruptive. He is independent and 
aggressive. Thus he is always hailed as a 
destroyer of religion, and, like Socrates or 
Jesus, denounced by the established priest- 



THE PROPHETIC INTEREST 59 

liness as a corrupter of the people, and 
more particularly of the young; for to 
them the prophet surely turns. The ex- 
pert, whether in music or religion or in 
art, is constantly bringing everything to 
the judgment bar of his formulated expert 
knowledge. The new message does not fit 
his rules, and so must be wrong, and he is 
tone-deaf to it or hardly listens. So to the 
young and the common people, whose very 
ignorance protects them from these expert 
prejudices, the prophet has generally to 
turn. It is not simply the Beckmessers and 
the pedants who are among the prophet's 
critics; the wise and balanced fear the new 
because they have seen so much cheap 
falseness parade as new redemption. The 
stability of the group, and the need for 
definite starting-points for any inquiry, 
makes the experienced man overcautious 
and even timid. 

And false prophets are quite as common 
as dead priests. The danger lies on the 
surface. By the very nature of his func- 
tion the prophet is exposed to all sorts of 
shipwreck. The vision that gives him his 
power is so vivid and so novel that all the 



60 RELIGION AND LIFE 

present Is dark and under condemnation. 
The prophet is critical and destructive, and 
generally indiscriminate and onesided. He 
almost compels opposition, and then is 
driven by the opposition into still more 
marked onesidedness. His general estimate 
of both the past and the present is un- 
historical. He is apt to idealize the past 
and see the present only in darkest colors. 
This unhistorical attitude leads to an under- 
valuation of discriminating history, and he 
would destroy the present institution to 
make way for the new construction. His 
experience is so vivid, his vision so clear, 
that he forgets that outsiders seek, and 
ought to seek, some way of judging of the 
vision and correcting the results by other 
experiences. 

To all these must be added the fact that 
the prophetic aspect in the history of re- 
ligion has been linked with genius and 
insanity, and that often only the future 
can decide whether the claims of genius 
are divine egotism or blank insanity. This 
is true of the prophetic messages in art, in 
music, or in literature. A humble unself- 
conscious prophet is well-nigh a psychologi- 



THE PROPHETIC INTEREST 61 

cal impossibility, and sometimes even his- 
tory has difficulty in deciding whether a 
Swedenborg and a Nietzsche are prophets 
or insane, and in rightly estimating the line 
where genius ends and insanity begins. 

The prophet may gather about him 
groups of followers, and soon his vision 
may be translated by others into organi- 
zations, but he himself is likely to be an 
intense and somewhat lonely individualist; 
and the supreme prophet must dwell much 
apart. His very function is the revelation 
of a new individuality, and the exhibition 
of a new and startling personality at its 
best and highest. He has to train first a 
group and then a generation to understand 
him. So much alone is he that even his 
nearest followers misjudge and misinter- 
pret him. Francis of Assisi had hardly 
gone to his grave before all he really stood 
for was denied in his name by those he 
had himself trained. Thus it happens 
that every great movement, so far as it 
has had the personal element in it, results 
in a second growth which seems almost 
like a caricature. The Reformation was 
succeeded by a theology that bore its 



62 RELIGION AND LIFE 

name, but had neither the Reformation 
spirit nor its life. Indeed, the supreme 
prophet can never be wholly expressed in 
any relatively static and priestly organiza- 
tion. Jesus Christ is more than Chris- 
tianity, Luther better worth while than 
Lutheranism. Buddha still outtops Bud- 
dhism. For the prophet is a revealer and 
the organization conserves as best it may 
but the remembrance of the revelation. 

At the same time we would know noth- 
ing to speak of concerning the prophet if 
the revelation were not dynamic in an or- 
ganization. Thus the two emphases in the 
religious life complete each other, and are 
never wholly separate. Both must take 
their place in the lifting of life into real 
sacredness, and flinging about the ex- 
periences of time the mantle of eternity. 
Nay, in all religious life both elements 
should normally have a place. He who 
has never known the emotional, uplifting 
power of a new religious experience can 
hardly have really put his religious life to 
any test. From time to time even the 
humblest and most obscure of those of us 
who make no claims to aught but the 



THE PROPHETIC INTEREST 63 

average human experience have had special 
approaches to the infinite mystery, and 
have felt the new power of special insight 
into duty, and far promise of things good. 

Yet while this is so, the greater part of 
our religious life must be spent in the 
simple, helpful routine of priestly refresh- 
ment and instruction. We go over the 
same things that helped us before; we 
engage with our fellows in the routine of 
religious exercise and find comfort and 
pleasure in it as we find comfort and joy 
in the rest of the familiar routine of life. 
How good and refreshing is the familiar 
simplicity and even dullness of home life 
after the novelty and excitement of a 
fascinating journey! We could never really 
endure a life in tents with Jesus on the 
Mount of Transfiguration. We must go 
down from it to find the light of common 
day, amid the other stupid followers and 
captious critics of the Master. There is 
comfort in finding our own ordinary, com- 
monplace level, even after a prophet has 
taken us up into the vision. We cannot 
live by visions alone; they must be trans- 
formed into the sober realities of everyday 



64 RELIGION AND LIFE 

life, and that life must incarnate the vision 
if we are not to be constantly betrayed by 
a fata morgana that entices us away from 
all reality to find ourselves at last lost 
amid the bitter disappointments of the 
mirage. 

No task is more delicate than that of 
trying the spirits whether they be of God 
or no. Temperament, training, self-interest, 
inertia, restlessness, conceit are predispos- 
ing causes to many false judgments, and 
once we have committed ourselves to the 
wrong side it generally takes some vision 
on the way to Damascus to break through 
the blind, obstinate zeal and reach the 
better manhood. 

Nor can we wholly trust the guides to 
whom we naturally turn. Institutional re- 
ligion has been too often mistaken to take 
the judgments of our natural mentors 
without examination. Institutional reli- 
gion rejected Wesley, Calvin, Luther, Sa- 
vonarola, not to speak of Paul and Jesus. 
Nevertheless, many false prophets are gone 
out into the world, and keep saying, "Lo, 
here!" or 'To, there!" Our mistakes have 
sometimes an intellectual reason — we sim- 



THE PROPHETIC INTEREST 65 

ply lacked clear vision. Sometimes they 
rest upon emotional or aesthetic misjudg- 
ments — we have been unable to weigh 
rightly the elements of taste and propor- 
tion. But the dangerous grounds for our 
failures to hear the Divine voice amid the 
confusions and Babel of sounds are our 
moral limitations. We are selfishly in- 
terested in some way in the maintenance 
of the old, and summon to our aid all the 
arguments we can gather to refute the 
prophet and drive him out of the religious 
or other circle in which he demands a 
hearing. 

The final test is, of course, the outcome 
in life. By their fruits we shall know 
them; but only exceedingly open-eyed and 
generous minds can save us in the day 
when the prophet comes to our Bethel and 
points us to a better and nobler way. 



THE LITERATURE 

The study of prophetism can best be carried on 
in connection with the Old Testament, where it 
reached its highest organized point. Consult the 
volume in Kent's "Students' Old Testament" deal- 



66 RELIGION AND LIFE 

ing with the prophets and their writings. Compare 
also the articles before mentioned on "Prophet" in 
the "Encyclopaedia Biblica" and in Hastings's 
"Bible Dictionary." Compare also C. H. Cornill's 
"Der israehtische Prophetismus" (3d Edition, Ger- 
man and English translation). Also the sections 
on "Prophetism" in H. P. Smith's "Old Testa- 
ment History." 



CHAPTER V 

Creative Idealism and Life 

The dispute between determinism and 
free will depends upon the assumption that 
a point of view mentally necessary for 
certain purposes can be therefore asserted 
as universally true. Whether we admit it 
or not, we are all determinists when we 
set out to know, because to know means 
the mastery of the conditions that resulted 
in the event we are investigating. That is 
to say, we really know anything only when 
we know it in its conditioning relations. 
We do "know" when we have discovered 
and exhaustively examined the conditions 
under which any event happened and 
would happen again if the conditions were 
reproduced. Our mastery over the world 
and life is made possible, so far as we 
possess it, by knowledge of the conditions 
which determine all activity and conduct. 
There are no single conditions, and there 
are no single results, so that when we 
even speak of the "main cause" we really 

67 



68 RELIGION AND LIFE 

only mean main cause from our point of 
view, because if anything is a condition at 
all, it is a necessary condition. If a man is 
killed on the street, the doctor says the 
**reason" he died was a fracture of the 
skull, the coronor's jury says the ''reason" 
he died was because a person unknown 
struck him. The friends say the ''cause" of 
his death was the lawless character of the 
town. The murderer says in his heart, 
"The 'reason' I killed him was my wanting 
his money." 

In the enormous complexity of life only 
very simple happenings can be even rela- 
tively reproduced. Even our finest science 
is but a rude instrument. The trained tea 
taster can with his tongue detect differences 
no chemistry can establish, and when we 
rise in the complexities of questions of 
taste no instruments of precision can do 
anything more than give us data for our 
personal judgments and decisions. We 
seek the "causes" or conditions and weigh 
them according to our main purpose. 

Moreover, the world we live in is each 
day and each hour a new world. Evolu- 
tion has to be taken seriously; and when 



CREATIVE IDEALISM 69 

we do so take it we realize that it is a 
growing world and that growth means 
novelty. Whatever life is as a form of 
energy, it is certainly the transformation 
process by which in the breaking down of 
special forms other and even more highly 
specialized forms result. These are new. 
Moreover, our knowledge, resting as it 
does upon experience (compare page 12), 
has as one of its most fundamental ex- 
periences that of our own creative activity 
in the world process. Of course this may 
be a delusion; but if so, then all experience 
may be delusion. It is open to the Indian 
metaphysician to maintain this attitude, 
but we are constantly reestablishing 
our faith in this creative efficiency by 
actually making the world we live in. And 
no man is so caught in the superficial 
fallacy of a mechanical determinism that he 
really can treat himself and other men as 
superior kinds of elaborate machines wholly 
conditioned by the ponderable elements of 
life. 

Now, among the most evident conditions 
upon which the new world we will live in 
to-morrow will depend are the ideals of 



70 RELIGION AND LIFE 

to-day. These have a history. They are 
not ex nihilOf but they are again condi- 
tioned by our own activity. We ''praise'* 
or "blame" the creative element in the 
personality that is an essential element in 
any idealism, and no analysis can be so 
keen as to trace the exact share the ideal 
has had in the world process, or to isolate 
from the ideal conditions out of which a 
creative ideal sprang the essential novelty. 
Yet it is patently there. Wagner did not 
create ex nihilo his symphonic harmonies, 
but it is a different world since Wagner 
created "Siegfried," and the glory of Ra- 
phael's Madonna can never be dissolved 
into photographic reproductions of living 
people and a scale of color learned from 
Perugino. He has created an indefinable 
something that has made the whole world 
of pictorial art new. Great creative per- 
sonalities of this kind are, however, only 
typical and illustrative of our o\\ti more 
common experiences. The world we Hve 
in is not made up simply of the elements 
we find; it is made of the us and the ele- 
ments we find. In fact, our real life con- 
sists in the clothing our ideals with what 



CREATIVE IDEALISM 71 

we call material fact. And the real diflfer- 
ence between daydreams and ideals con- 
sists in this creative character. That this 
creative character is within limits goes 
without saying. Our increasing mastery 
over our environment, and our increasing 
understanding of the part we are called 
upon to play, never lifts us out of the 
conditions under which alone our activity 
has any meaning. Nay, our whole mastery 
over the external world depends upon our 
knowledge of its conditional existence and 
our own realization of our conditioned 
mental life. This, however, not only does 
not make the picture of a complicated, well- 
oiled, and well-cared-for engine an ade- 
quate symbol of our life, but it excludes it. 
The engine maker has clothed his ideal, as 
nearly as he may, in steel and copper and 
iron, but he has not implanted in it his own 
creative idealism. 

Religion has invested this creative ideal- 
ism in all ages with peculiar sacredness. 
The ideals of the individual and the ideals 
of a group are the really essential facts in 
human life, and religion has always re- 
garded the ideal as the place where the 



7£ RELIGION AND LIFE 

divine breaks through and touches human 
life. In the prophetic ecstasy or in the 
stately ceremonial ritual the conditions are 
given for this contact with the power or 
powers upon which man feels his essen- 
tial dependence. Under all the varied and 
ofttimes strange and even revolting sym- 
bolism of religion there speaks this faith 
in man that he is in some way linked with, 
and responsible to, a higher unseen world, 
which is the source and home of those 
ideals he strives himself to find and per- 
fect, and in turn to work into the fabric of 
the process of life. 

From the primitive animism of man in 
savage simplicity to the lofty idealism of 
Plato or the transcendentahsm of Kant 
human life has never been without its wit- 
nesses to this tremendous faith, nor has 
this faith ever failed to justify its reality 
by recreating and transforming men and 
the world. In the whole range of human 
experience no force has been more patently 
in evidence in the affairs of man than this 
abiding faith. Even when the attempt to 
formulate this faith either in a religion or 
a philosophy or a rule of conduct fails to 



CREATIVE IDEALISM 73 

wholly meet the inevitable test of farther 
experience and new demands, the faith it- 
self survives the wreck of the formulation, 
and goes again to work at new formulation. 

Religion has always taught men under 
one form or another that they are coopera- 
tive creative agencies with the powers that 
are unseen. Whatever else totemism is or 
is not, it marks the emphasis man put 
upon the connection of his higher life with 
a world of spirits beyond him and cooperat- 
ing with him. For it is important to re- 
member that religion never exhausts itself 
in the thought of dependence (as Schleier- 
macher's theory taught), but always in- 
cludes the thought of sharing life with the 
god and cooperating with him. 

Thus in the formation of an ideal the 
thought of the unseen power, however 
named or symbolized, has always accom- 
panied man. The natural expression has 
been a tribal god, or a god of the group, 
who guards, inspires, and struggles with 
and for the group. The iniSnite attributes 
with which the reflections of highly de- 
veloped religion invest the conception of 
God do not belong to this lower stage of 



74 RELIGION AND LIFE 

simple primitive acceptance in naive man- 
ner of the tribal god as friend and helper. 
He is powerful to help, and willing to do 
battle for the group that is faithful to him. 
In general, his sway has geographical limits. 
The home of the group is his home. Je- 
hovah is for Israel the God who brought 
them out of the land of Egypt, and the 
other gods the Israelitish tribes or phratries 
are not to worship because he is a jealous 
God. He becomes the guardian and cham- 
pion of the life of the tribe in all its aspects. 
Thus from the beginning God is the guar- 
antee of the ideals of a humanity that is 
ever creating a new world of moral and 
religious emotion, and generation after 
generation of men have felt the cooperation 
of powers not their own in the formation of 
these ideals and the translation of them into 
life and conduct. 

The two phases of this process of giving 
ideals to the group are the conservation of 
the past gains, and the reinterpretation of 
these in the light of farther experience. 
Thus the priestly function guards the ideals 
of the past. In them the priest feels that 
he has access to the creative life. The 



CREATIVE IDEALISM 75 

school, the church, the academy, the poK- 
tical following all are bent upon the main- 
tenance of their several traditions, and in 
them see the ideal life set forth. God is 
working in these institutions and caring for 
the ideal life, which is in all its aspects, 
whether artistic, literary, moral, or reli- 
gious, the goal of the true man. 

Selfishness, and especially subtle forms 
of class selfishness, easily make these con- 
servative forces the mere ignoble instru- 
ments of their narrower purpose. At the 
same time it is unjust and unhistorical to 
overlook the fact that it is in these insti- 
tutional and essentially conservative ways 
of thinking that the creative ideals of the 
individual and the group are handed down. 
The ideal must clothe itself with material 
fact. The artistic instinct must find ex- 
pression in beautiful form or tone, and the 
new creative religious ideal must express 
itself in fellowships and sacraments, in 
buildings and new codes of worship and 
conduct. In the undifferentiated life all 
ideals are essentially religious. Painting 
is worship or the handmaid of worship. 
Music is communion with the Unseen. The 



76 RELIGION AND LIFE 

architect builds the habitation of the Most 
High. The scholar communes with the 
Eternal in a sacred tongue handed down 
as infallible tradition and divinely given 
poetry. The sacredness and high signifi- 
cance of these outward forms increase as 
age justifies their usefulness. Rightly men 
come to feel that he who has no reverence 
for the past and no sympathetic insight 
into its future significance, has little claim 
to understand the present and little power 
to rightly create a future. In the history 
of the past all men may find real contact 
with the unseen reality, and may come into 
vital relationship with its creative ideals. 
And in such contacts we may ourselves 
gain the creative power to reconstruct in 
cooperation with our generation the life 
that lies around us. Thus the classic forms 
of Greece and the religious inspirations of 
the Jewish prophets are always awakening 
men anew to the ideal life, and kindling 
again in them new hopes and new aspira- 
tions. For all men who are really at work 
at all feel themselves creatively at work. 
They may be only intending to build again 
the new generation in the likeness of the 



CREATIVE IDEALISM 77 

old; they may simply desire to create again 
forms like those of the honored past. But 
the most conservative and confident priest 
of the ideal life in any of its unnumbered 
ministries is eagerly at work rebuilding 
his day and generation in the likeness of 
his ideal wherever he may have found it. 
And in doing this even the most eagerly 
conservative spirit, who thinks he finds the 
whole of truth in the great traditions of a 
past art or an historic religion, but who 
goes about his task of lovingly restating the 
content of that life, becomes, according to 
the measure of his success, a new creative 
element, a distinct factor in the inevitably 
new world of his to-morrow. 

And in like manner he who most intelli- 
gently feels himself the bearer of a new 
message to mankind marks his dependence 
upon the past. With something like im- 
patience Jesus pointed to past prophecy as 
the source from which his critics also could 
learn the truths he taught. Wagner felt 
himself the logical outcome of Beet- 
hoven's rebellion against uncreative musi- 
cal monotony. 

At the same time we lesser ones feel 



78 RELIGION AND LIFE 

ourselves brought by genius into touch 
with eternal reality, and see in the genuine 
prophetic ecstasy a breaking through into 
our world of material fact of a new creative 
energy, and speak of the prophet, whether 
in art or in religion, as inspired. We easily 
recognize the fact that this inspiration has 
its degrees and its ranges; that it is marked 
by its purpose as of a higher or a lower 
scale of value to human life. The word 
"divine" may be used to cover the genius 
of a Shakespeare or the inflatus of Isaiah. 
What marks them both to us as of su- 
perior mold is the fact that their work is 
revelation. What gives the higher value to 
the religious prophet in contrast to the artist 
or the litterateur is that he speaks to us of 
God, while they speak to us of a human life, 
and that our daily experience leads us to cry 
out after that revelation of God in whom 
all our ideals seem to have their source and 
guarantee. 

The function of the prophet in all ages 
has been the proclamation of a new crea- 
tive ideal. Our first impulse is, therefore, 
always to stone him, because he can re- 
create our ideals only by, in a measure, de- 



CREATIVE IDEALISM 79 

stroying and superseding past ideals. We 
are exceeding loath to part with these 
precious ideals of the past, and just in pro- 
portion as the prophet's revelation is new 
it seems difficult to in any way harmonize 
the claims of the new and the old. Yet in 
the long run the new ideal works its way 
into life and actually creates an environ- 
ment in which it settles down and lives, 
and we then build the tombs of the men 
who gave us the new ideals, and real- 
ize that once more we were slaying the 
prophets and stoning them that were sent 
unto us. 

Nothing marks genius so emphatically as 
this quality of revelation. Genius, whether 
in the region of art, literature, music, or 
religion, is not merely a capacity for taking 
pains or a gift of hard work. These things 
seem to exist sometimes almost to the ex- 
clusion of genius. The prophetic genius is 
inspired. He sees and knows what we do 
not see or know until he reveals it to us, 
and on its highest reaches we feel at once 
that flesh and blood have not revealed 
these things either to him or to us, but that 
God has spoken; that the Infinite has 



80 RELIGION AND LIFE 

touched creatively again a plastic life, and 
is forming and reforming it. 

Moreover, our ears are dull, our senses 
heavy, and the vision of the prophet may 
easily seem to us a wild and silly tale. We 
have also been stupidly foolish from time 
to time in our acceptance of disordered 
fancy for heavenly revelation. Hence we 
rather gladly escape if we can the painful 
process of readjustments of our inner life. 
Children, and not the wise, the babes and 
the simple, rather than teachers and ex- 
perts, must be the prophet's pupils, until 
his creative vision has formed a new world 
in which men then live, unconscious often 
of the birth pangs when the Spirit brooded 
again upon the face of the deep, and dark- 
ness gave way to light. 

Great are the prophets' risks. Self- 
deception seems quite as common as de- 
liberate quackery, and once upon the 
pathway of prophetic leadership, self- 
deception may play a role even in the 
lives of superior genius, and a prophetic 
soul like that of Savonarola may end in a 
great and heart-breaking catastrophe. Or 
the inspiration may seem to fail, and in 



CREATIVE IDEALISM 81 

desperation means are sought to heighten 
the life and restore the vision. Early 
religious leadership sought to superinduce 
by drugs, by fastings, by wild fantastic 
dances, or by self-inflicted wounds the 
vision and the rapture, and so secure con- 
tact with the eternal. How far these 
superinduced trances and visions have ac- 
tually affected the really creative ideals of 
mankind and actually led the way up to 
larger and fuller life is a question in which 
religious prejudice would, at present, be so 
concerned that an objective estimate is 
made very difficult. All that can be said 
with certainty is that the trend of human 
experience is away from such visions and 
raptures, and that deep distrust of them 
animates the intelligent leaders of religious 
thought in Hinduism, Mohammedanism, 
and both branches of Christianity, while 
Judaism has never been prone to these 
excesses. 

THE LITERATURE 

For this discussion the books that may prove 
most suggestive are perhaps William James's "Will 
to Believe" and "Pragmatism," Bradley's "Ap- 



8^ RELIGION AND LIFE 

pearances and Reality," Bergson's "Creative Evolu- 
tion," Royce's "The World and the Individual." 
Compare with these the basal works of Kant and 
Lotze and Fechner already mentioned. In Kant 
and Fechner many of the positions of the most 
modern philosophy are foreshadowed or plainly set 
forth. 



CHAPTER VI 

Religion and Mastery of the Material 

World 

The religious ideals of mankind sooner 
or later always attempt some material ex- 
pression. The endeavor is soon made to 
clothe the religious ideal with material fact. 
Jacob has his dream, and erects an altar 
to be a permanent place of access to the 
Unseen and Invisible. Weapons are con- 
secrated to the use of the god, the tribe 
seeks to organize its life after the religious 
ideal handed down from generation to 
generation, but with steadily increasing 
evolution. Thus when at last stable con- 
ditions are reached the temple becomes the 
center of the group life, and mastery over 
the various materials at man's disposal is 
sought, that the temple may be resplendent 
and impressive. In this way the mastery 
over the material world is separated in 
good measure from immediate utility, and 
is linked as an end with ideal aims and 
much less obvious advantages than warmth 

83 



84 RELIGION AND LIFE 

and protection. The temple becomes the 
center of education in a manifold way. All 
writing seems originally to have been 
linked with religious records. The temples 
become the archives of the group, and the 
homes of the learned and the wise. Amid 
all the trickery and deception that soon 
clusters about a priestly caste and a de- 
veloped temple life, it is plain that prac- 
tically nothing has so advanced man's 
mastery over the material world as this 
sacred learning and it abundantly justifies 
their existence. They have all been very 
far from ideal, and in the late stages 
of hardened traditionalism have been even 
hindrances to progress, but the thoughtful 
man must be set to wonder what progress 
we would have had at all without them. 
Those who often uncritically glorify pagan- 
ism, and are inclined to take a negative 
attitude to religion in its name, would do 
well to remember that all the paganism we 
know, and particularly Greek paganism, 
was religious through and through. Greek 
art has, in fact, its highest significance in 
its religious character. The mastery of the 
external world of stone and wood and clay 



RELIGION AND MASTERY 85 

was gained first and foremost in the name 
of that world beyond ruled by the gods, 
and giving background and content to the 
thinking of Greece. 

It is easy to forget how desperately poor 
the worlds of Greece and Rome, of Baby- 
lon and Egypt were. The struggle for 
home and food for the vast majority cost 
all the energy they had. Only some great 
ideal could hold them to the extra effort 
needed to build noble buildings and splen- 
did marble piles. And the sacred buildings 
of antiquity were not the product of simple 
imperial whim. The grinding taxation and 
the fearful cost could be met only in the 
interest of what was nationally important. 
Not even national defense could seemingly 
call out the sacrifice religion exacted with 
relative ease. Nor do these sacrifices be- 
come less as the basis of the ruling class 
becomes broader. The limited democra- 
cies of Greece, Rome, and the Free Cities 
outstrip the imperialisms of the past in 
the rapidity of their progress and in the 
prodigality of their expenditure for ideal 
ends. 

Nor was it otherwise when a larger 



86 RELIGION AND LIFE 

world made impossible the conditions both 
political and intellectual that obtained in 
Hellenism. The so-called decline and fall of 
the Roman empire has been too narrowly- 
interpreted. The lamentations of a class 
have been mistaken for the tribulations of 
the people. In fact, it is doubtful whether 
the mass of men within the Roman world 
were not vastly better off in most of the 
days of so-called decline than at the time 
of the undisputed domination of the im- 
perial oligarchy. What the decline and 
fall really meant was the bankruptcy of a 
slave-holding aristocratic oligarchy because 
it was an inefficient economic form of 
human organization. The world passed 
from the hands of this military aristocracy 
to a freedman class, whose more efficient 
productive methods made them the natural 
heirs of the well-nigh exhausted heritage. 
Here, again, the one force that was strong 
enough to hold that class together and give 
it a sufficient unity of purpose to beat back 
invasion from the North and East, and 
enough vitality to reconquer and recon- 
struct its material environment, was Chris- 
tianity. It is to this Christianized 



RELIGION AND MASTERY 87 

freedman class that the world owes the 
preservation of Hellenistic culture, and the 
reordering in the spirit of Roman law of 
the occidental world. It would be un- 
grateful to forget the contribution of Arabic 
scholarship, and the services of the syna- 
gogue, but these also were religious in their 
main interest, and illustrate only the more 
clearly the profound influence of religion in 
giving men ideals of a creative character, 
and bidding them obtain mastery over 
their material world. 

All the guilds of the Middle Ages were 
in the beginning religious organizations, and 
the arts and crafts rose under the inspira- 
tion of great cathedrals, whose influence 
was reflected in domestic architecture, and 
in the nobler attempts to express life in the 
rebellious media of oak and stone. Home 
adornment is a relatively recent develop- 
ment. The cathedral and church, the 
monastery and chapel gave the lines along 
which the palaces of kings and the homes 
of the wealthy were later adorned. All art 
is practically the outcome of men trying to 
express their religious ideals. And this is 
the case everywhere, in Greece and in 



88 RELIGION AND LIFE 

Rome, in Egypt or Babylon, in India or 
Mexico. 

The battle men have fought with their 
material environment, making stone shel- 
ter them, and wood obey their behests, and 
compelling clay and canvas to give back 
life, has been fought in largest part under 
the inspirations and enthusiasms of reli- 
gion, so that when men tell us they have 
found a substitute for religion or that 
these inspirations and enthusiasms have no 
objective basis in fact, it certainly makes 
us anxious for our civilization, lest the sub- 
stitute prove futile and the real force be 
lost. It has not been the only incentive. 
Love, hunger and cold, military necessity 
and mere prying curiosity are factors of no 
mean value in man's progress upward, but 
of all the factors we may name no one is 
comparable for a moment, as a mere mat- 
ter of history, with religious enthusiasm for 
the incarnation of religious ideals. The 
great obstacle to progress is inertia. Only 
great excitement can at times overcome 
this, and for its steady overcoming only 
some great ideal enthusiasm can be really 
counted upon. No one enthusiasm has had 



RELIGION AND MASTERY 89 

the enduring, steady, pushing force from 
generation to generation exhibited by the 
rehgious ideal. Hence nearly all the per- 
manent monuments of past ages that de- 
manded steady struggle with brick and 
stone to give them character are religious. 
So it is in the Middle Ages and up to our 
own day. 

Only the most shallow and superficial 
philosophy of history can in the face of the 
facts trace man's progress toward com- 
plete mastery of his world to individual 
selfishness. The hold of the group upon 
life, the heightening of individual desire by 
social contact, the almost complete subor- 
dination of the individual desire to the 
group ideal are now commonplaces of 
the classroom of psychology, and these 
group ideals which have for uncounted 
ages held men to their task of winning a 
material world have always been touched 
and generally formed by religion. The 
conquest of the great Northwest as traced 
in the fascinating pages of a Parkman, or 
the winning of a foothold on the bleak 
New England shores, was the direct out- 
come of social religious enthusiasms, and 



90 RELIGION AND LIFE 

however much modern material advance 
may seem in some of its most important 
phases to be now independent of religious 
life, it will be well for the historian to 
pause and ask himself more seriously than 
some seem inclined to do, what is still the 
relationship between the creative ideals of 
the present and the religious enthusiasms 
that are covering the land with churches, 
hospitals, colleges, social settlements, and 
philanthropic centers ; for to-day, as always, 
the religious ideal is expressing itself in 
material fact. When mechanical material- 
ism seemed at the height of its fashion. 
Christian Science spread as a kind of 
visible protest a network of churches all 
over the land, calling out in a generation 
more actual embodied human effort in 
buildings and books than naked material- 
ism has to its credit in three centuries. 

To the task of mastery of this material 
world some ideal of categorical imperative 
insistence is needed. It would be absurd 
to try and link this ideal in every case with 
the dogmatic content of some religious be- 
lief. No sensible man would make such a 
claim, but to trace the actual religious 



RELIGION AND MASTERY 91 

elements in the ideals which have moved 
men to such real mastery is a revelation of 
the power the religious ideal still exerts in 
a thousand ways hidden from the ordinary 
and superficial onlooker. Indeed, the un- 
fortunate identification of the religious en- 
thusiasm with its dogmatic content has 
blinded men to the real issues and often 
led them astray in their analysis of a 
situation. 

Our material world is still but indiflFer- 
ently mastered. We are still engaged in a 
fight for subsistence and safety. Almost 
nothing so hinders us in our struggle as 
mutual suspicion and selfishness. We are 
flinging away a vast percentage of our 
energy in watching each other to keep 
some from stealing. We waste our re- 
sources in useless military provision for 
absurd assaults. Neither science, nor com- 
merce, nor self-interest suggests any remedy. 
Is it not time to inquire whether there is 
any ideal enthusiasm sufficiently world- 
wide in its reach and sufficiently imperative 
in its insistence that will give men pause 
in the predatory life, and call them more 
effectively to the task of mastery of the 



92 RELIGION AND LIFE 

material worid, to clothe this ideal with 
material fact? 

La past ages religious enthusiasm has 
bound men together as no other interest 
has succeeded in doing. The bitterness of 
religious wars is a result of this power of 
cohesion. Nothing but religious zeal, how- 
ever misdirected, would have held men 
together through the long struggles of the 
Mohammedan wars, the Crusades, and the 
Thirty Years' War in Europe. And the 
question must be raised and answered. Is 
there anv force that can possiblv take its 
place? The nobler world religions all 
profess international unity and peace. 
Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, and 
Judaism, the Mother of Christianity, are 
cosmopolitan in faith and fact. All teach 
lo\'ing regard for all others, and all have 
in varied degree the missionarv^ and helpful 
spirit. The world to-day is now most 
desperately in need of international peace. 
Vast changes have come over our lives. 
We struggle now with a new outlook upon 
all life, and are on the eve of readjustments 
of human relations that will tax our ma- 
terial resources as never before. Are we 



RELIGION AND MASTERY 9S 

going to continue throwing away nearly 
half of our national revenues on purposes 
fundamentally anti-social? And have not a 
world-wide religious reawakening and a 
world-wide religious federation some place 
in our thought and hope? 



THE LITERATURE 

The works of Ruskin may open our eyes to some 
of the relations of religion to art. The relations 
of religion to early Babylonian civilization may be 
studied in Professor Jastrow*s admirable "Religion 
of Babylon and Assyria" (the enlarged form, Ger- 
man, 1904). For Egypt, see Breasted's "History 
of Egypt" and "History of the Ancient Egyptians," 
Ernan's "Religion of the Egyptians" (German and 
English translation). For the guilds of the Middle 
Ages, see Gross's "The Gild Merchant," two 
volumes, 1890, and Chapters V and VI of Kropot- 
kin's "Mutual Aid" (1903). 



CHAPTER VII 

Religion and Society 

In spite of the great work already done 
in trying to clear up the questions con- 
nected with tribal organization much re- 
mains as yet most puzzling. One thing, 
however, stands out clearly, and that is 
that the whole early organization of human 
life was controlled by an elaborate religious 
system. Wherever we turn we find the 
marriage customs under a most stringent 
system of taboo. No other force seems able 
to prevent the various relations between 
the sexes that experience, no doubt, had 
proved disastrous. All over the world re- 
ligion flings its character of sacredness over 
the degrees of relationship within which 
marriage takes place; and in Greek tragedy 
no guilt is blacker and no breach of law 
so horrible as to offend against the mar- 
riage taboo even unwittingly. This religious 
social control extends also to the other 
family relationships. Duty to parents, the 
obedience of children, the relationships of 

94 



RELIGION AND SOCIETY 95 

blood, with the obligations of blood re- 
venge and the duties of confraternity, all 
receive the high sanction of religion. 

The Old Testament bears witness to 
what are now seen to be a custom of primi- 
tive people everywhere. There is, as in the 
story of Cain and Abel, a limit to blood 
revenge within the brotherly group. The 
"Sword Song" illustrates the farther limi- 
tation under religious sanction of the blood 
revenge. The sacrilege of taboo is wit- 
nessed to by the story of Abraham in 
Egypt. Isaac must seek a wife of a certain 
gens, and so all through the earlier docu- 
ments we see the steady march of the 
group to national life under the religious 
enthusiasm of leaders who are the "called 
of God." But this is not exceptional. 
Whether in Mexico or Alaska, in India or 
in Egypt, we see the same phenomena. 
The reverence before the religious taboo, 
the horror that sacrilege inspires, the 
fearsome shrinking from disobedience to 
divine command chasten and soften and 
regulate the relationships between man 
and man, and gradually between group and 
group. Indeed, where groups do not have 



96 RELIGION AND LIFE 

the same god there can be no natural 
ethical relationship, and there must be 
substituted a formal legal agreement. All 
intergroup relationships have, therefore, on 
into our own day an artificial and legal 
character. Only that is wrong which is 
forbidden in the treaty document. There 
is some reason for believing that the origin 
of all written law is thus a treaty arrange- 
ment, that the "tables" of both Roman 
and Jewish law date from the intergroup 
ethics that needed a written sanction 
where the "blood" sanction was becoming 
dim. 

Here, again, it is religion that lends its 
sanction to the written law. Every court 
bears witness in its forms and oaths to the 
exceedingly fundamental character of this 
sanction. All early trials were the tri- 
bunals of God. Between equals God is 
alone the arbiter, and mortal combat was 
the earliest way of discovering his decision. 
Always lot and sign and omen give some 
clue to his righteous will, and in all cases 
he was the final arbiter. 

Since the Reformation among European 
nations the thought of religion as the ex- 



RELIGION AND SOCIETY 97 

elusive group bond has more or less passed 
away. We still speak of "Christian" na- 
tions, and conserve state churches, and 
many outward forms of a past religious 
life; but even in countries predominantly 
Roman Catholic the older conception of a 
priestly state is really gone. Not even in 
Spain does it survive as more than a 
shadow of the former faith. Hence it is 
easy to raise the question whether religion 
has not fulfilled its function, and now 
hands over its work to other and more 
modern interests. 

The separation of church and state 
seems only a question of time even in 
those lands where it has been most inter- 
woven with the national thinking and the 
social life. At the same time religion has 
never been coextensive with ecclesiasti- 
cism. On the contrary, as our discussion 
has shown, the function of a priestly 
church almost inevitably brings it sooner 
or later into conflict with religion on its 
prophetic revelationary side. The con- 
servative instinct of the ecclesiastical for- 
mulation of religion must, almost of 
necessity, attach itself to the social order 



98 RELIGION AND LIFE 

out of which it sprang. Hence the truth 
that nations are repudiating the national 
churches only marks the fact that since 
the Reformation human history has seen 
the rise and relative decline of several 
social orders, and, indeed, that any na- 
tional church has survived the changes 
that have gone on since 1648, 1793, 1832, 
and 1848, not to speak of such crises as 
our own in 1865, only emphasizes the 
truth that no ecclesiastical organization is 
so wholly encased in priestly tradition as 
to lose entirely the prophetic elasticity 
which enables it to readapt itself to a 
changing order. The national churches 
have, without being always conscious of 
the fact, changed their message and char- 
acter with the growth of the new national 
life. This is the significance of the High, 
Low, and Broad church parties in England, 
of the Old, Mediating, and Modern theolo- 
gies of the Lutheran Church in Germany, 
and of Modernism in the Roman Catholic 
communion. 

There is absolutely no evidence to show 
that religion to-day has less of a hold over 
human life than in its past history, and 



RELIGION AND SOCIETY 99 

when anyone asks where are the moral and 
ideal elements of any national life to be 
found, the answer of any unbiased ob- 
server will still have to be, not exclusively, 
but yet predominantly in the organized 
churches. 

The obedience in the past of the indi- 
vidual to the group religion by no means 
proves all the individuals were in any sense 
religious. Formal acceptance of the group 
life simply included this conformity. So 
to-day American citizenship includes a 
conformity to many usages that in no way 
reflect or affect the inner life of the indi- 
vidual. The breaking down of uniformity 
in the manner of living and thinking within 
national groups is due to many causes, and 
acceptance of some form of organized re- 
ligious life signifies a deliberate choice and 
an overcoming of inertia that renders 
church membership to-day a very diflFerent 
and more significant thing than it once 
was. 

It is always hard to trace successfully 
the complicated conditions of national life 
and action, but no one can deny that to-day 
moral ideals are an increasing factor in 



100 RELIGION AND LIFE 

national action everywhere; that men are 
swayed in their purposes by moral incite- 
ment as perhaps never before. It is true 
that the inhibitions of a keen intellectual 
analysis are felt at times as perhaps was 
once not the case, and waves of uncon- 
trolled hysteria, although not by any 
means excluded, are at least increasingly 
unlikely. But we must not measure reli- 
gion as a force by its climactic emotional 
periods. The hysterical movements that 
marked the period of the Crusades do not 
in any way prove that that age was in 
reality more religious than calmer times in 
human thought; and to-day, when rational 
analvsis tends constantly to check free 
emotional self-expression, not only religion, 
but also art and poetry, find less emotional, 
but no less real, ways of interpreting life. 
Robert Browning is unthinkable at an 
earlier date than the end of the nineteenth 
century, and it ma^^ well be that intellectual 
analysis will give way in a near future to 
less rationalized expressions. Then again 
reUgion and art will control human conduct 
by touching it once more mainly on the 
side of feeling and affection. To-day, how- 



RELIGION AND SOCIETY 101 

ever, much religious pressure wholly es- 
capes notice because it acts on the intel- 
lectual rather than the emotional life, and 
is only to be recognized as a part in a 
creative ideal that expresses itself almost 
entirely in action or a theory of action. 

This is only to say that a man's real 
religion enters vitally into his working 
faith. And we no longer call that religion 
which consists simply in conformity to a 
group life, as once men in effect did. In 
other words, to-day we call real religion only 
that which actually sways a man's con- 
duct, whereas once much passed for religion 
which consisted in being swayed by group 
habit or emotion. Thus religion means a 
far more personal and unanalyzable factor 
in life to-day than ever before. Attendance 
upon mass or synagogue, upon church or 
chapel in no way now stamps a man as in 
reality religious. He may or may not be 
religious, and we try to watch his conduct, 
and value any professions he may make by 
their outcome there. 

If, therefore, we are to decide the ques- 
tion as to how far religion still affects 
men's relations with one another, we must 



lOS RELIGION AND LIFE 

try to examine the ideals that are recreat- 
ing the world from day to day. Then we 
must ask how far anything like vital reli- 
gion is an element in these ideals. 

Such a task is in its many details far too 
large a one for these pages. Only one or 
two things can be pointed out. In the first 
place, in the transformation of the Oriental 
world, and of China and Japan, the ideals 
that are at work are those of Occidental 
culture. Many elements in that culture 
impress the less advanced nations. One, of 
course, is the sheer brute strength of our 
military organization. Another is our com- 
mercial and industrial efficiency. Then 
they are being evidently stirred by our 
relative democracy and political inde- 
pendence, but not least is the religious 
education which is connected directly with 
an intense religious propaganda. Of this 
propaganda the ordinary man outside the 
organized church life has as vague ideas as 
the Roman literati had of the spread of 
Christianity; but not even our boasted 
commerce makes as intense and venture- 
some efforts at winning these worlds as 
Christianity. It has a vitality that ex- 



RELIGION AND SOCIETY 103 

presses itself in missions, hospitals, schools, 
monasteries, convents, and churches all 
over the East, and in a thousand ways is 
undermining the old pagan world and 
making ready the soil for the vast changes 
evidently impending. As a mere evidence 
of the tremendous force that religion repre- 
sents in the lives of modern men the story 
of missions is of great scientific value, for 
it must be remembered that although mis- 
sions are as old as Christianity, the over- 
whelming and world-wide organization, 
with its intense life and emphasis upon 
education, is completely modern, and has 
an effectiveness, and consequent character, 
comparable to nothing of the same kind 
in history. Over great areas of life these 
missionary efforts are in many ways modi- 
fying even the religions which oppose them 
most, and compel a rival zeal and higher 
and higher moral standards. 

Buddhism in Japan may not disappear, 
but to hold its own against the impact of 
Roman Catholic and Protestant missions it 
must take on new life and must minister 
with increasing effectiveness to the reli- 
gious needs of Japan. The missionary or- 



104 RELIGION AND LIFE 

ganizations are signs of something — some 
force great enough to compel men to give 
their lives in increasing numbers to the 
work of religious propaganda, and great 
enough to organize a rapidly increasing 
machinery to maintain this army in the 
field. If religion is a vast illusion, it is one 
that shows no signs at present of abate- 
ment, but, rather, is manifesting its vi- 
tality in a way even more striking and 
dramatic than in the time of Mohammed 
or the Crusades. 

Nor are there any signs that a general 
scientific intelligence is taking the place 
of religion in the lives of men. This ex- 
pectation was at one time the general atti- 
tude of a certain type of thoughtful mind. 
A wave of most undeniably useful agnos- 
ticism swept the intellectual world about 
the middle of the nineteenth century, as a 
similar wave of dogmatic rationalism swept 
the thought of the early eighteenth century. 
These movements led to reinvestigation of 
almost every accepted position. Nothing 
was regarded as settled, and we still live 
in this atmosphere of intellectual hesita- 
tion. Mathematical ''certainty" has be- 



RELIGION AND SOCIETY 105 

come a beautiful art of definition; history, 
the personal interpretation of facts; chem- 
istry, a marvelous structure built upon an 
hypothesis of atomic structure no man can 
demonstrate to be true; physics, a splendid 
creation resting on a brilliant guess that 
electric ions are the final substratum of 
extension in space. And yet this intel- 
lectual agnosticism, whether in science or 
religion, whether it deals with the author- 
ship of the fourth Gospel, or the very 
personal history of Jesus, or the question 
whether mind is matter, or matter is mind, 
has not proved a weight upon the activity 
of our life. On the contrary, at no time 
in man's history has he gone with such 
triumphant confidence forward to do and 
to reconstruct in all spheres of life as he 
has under the spell of these seemingly so 
crippling conclusions. 

The general hypothesis of an evolution 
and a survival of the fit has raised all 
manner of ultimate questions such as 
"Who are the fit.^^" Are simply the 
brutally strong the "fit," or shall, indeed, 
the meek inherit the earth? Whence are 
we moving in the stream of evolution.^ 



106 RELIGION AND LIFE 

\Miat is "progress" if there be no goal? 
And amid all these questions men see more 
clearly than ever that religious faith in a 
higher life, a nobler manhood, a di\'iner 
ideal, a more wondrous vision of realitv 
is one of the persistent facts that survive 
all intellectual hesitation and all philo- 
sophic doubt. In the field of religion, as 
in all other fields, the test of truth has 
become the \'italizing power of the faith 
to accomplish, to strengthen, to quicken 
moral activity, to sustain and comfort, to 
direct and inspire. And one note of 
to-day is that men are bound together by 
a bond of unwavering fidelity to intel- 
lectual sinceritv rather than bv bonds of 
conformity to a definite group t^^^pe. Many 
of the associations of men are no longer 
avowedly religious, whose inner spirit and 
whose leaders are more definitelv com- 
mitted to religious ideals than even in the 
days when everv' trade guild was an 
avowedly religious organization. Thus, for 
example, the social settlement movement 
would have no such place in men's lives 
to-day were it definitely committed to any 
form of dogmatic religion, but it could not 



RELIGION AND SOCIETY 107 

live for a month were it to be deprived of 
the support of religious idealism. 

Can any man imagine the life of the 
community suddenly deprived of the re- 
ligious idealism incarnate in the churches? 
It may often be misdirected — what human 
energy is not often misdirected? It may 
often be far less than one might wish — 
where does any reality meet our nobler 
expectation? But what it means year in 
and year out cannot possibly be expressed 
in even the really astonishing statistics of 
the United States census. As in all time, 
so now, religion watches over man's rela- 
tions to his fellow man, and is slowly and 
constantly transforming and remolding 
them as a force that no one has ever 
properly and justly estimated in its rela- 
tions to the other formative forces in 
m^n's upward struggle. 

THE LITERATURE 

This chapter suggests questions raised by Kidd 
in his "Social Evolution," and compare also Drum- 
mond*s "Ascent of Man"; and for foreign missions 
as a social force see Dennis's "Centennial Survey of 
Foreign Missions" and Carroll's "Religious Census 
of the United States." 



CHAPTER VIII 

Types of Religious Development 

In the previous chapters we had often 
occasion to speak of the prophetic and 
priestly type in the religious development, 
but there are other lines of more particular 
distinction between types of religion on its 
distinctly personal side which must be 
considered in any attempt to estimate re- 
Ugion in its relation to life. Since re- 
ligion must be regarded as a reaction of 
the whole personality, and fundamentally 
an attitude of the real self toward what is 
regarded as the actually highest ideal, these 
types will be determined, in the last 
analysis, by some emphasis in that reac- 
tion. It will be convenient to classify 
these emphases under the three main as- 
pects of the life of the soul. There are the 
prevalently emotional types of religious 
life, with two main expressions of that 
emotional life, the sesthetic and the mystic 
— each seeking order and harmony in self- 
expression, but one predominantly in the 

108 



RELIGIOUS TYPES 109 

outer life, and the other in the inner ex- 
perience. 

Then there are also the intellectual 
types. These too have a twofold classijfica- 
tion. The intellectual interest may be 
dogmatic; seeking rest in some final and 
unquestioned authority found in an in- 
tellectually satisfying system. The in- 
terest in this mental rest is a somewhat 
complex thing, but the note is always the 
same. Another intellectual type restlessly 
seeks its satisfaction in speculation, al- 
though here, again, the interest in the 
speculation is often varied. 

Now, lastly, there is a distinctly prag- 
matic, or "action," type of religious de- 
velopment. In this case the activity in 
which the religious life finds its main ex- 
pression may be either, again, predomi- 
nantly emotion, unreflecting activity, or 
an exceedingly unemotional and highly re- 
flective type of activity. Personality is so 
complex that it is impossible to get more 
than approximately pure types of these 
various religious developments. The 
changes in great personalities are many 
and confusing; the differences of circum- 



110 RELIGION AND LIFE 

stance may seem to bring out an entirely 
new side in the same religious biography. 
The broad-minded pastor becomes a nar- 
row-minded bishop, or the thoughtful, 
tolerant student an intolerant traditional 
administrator. At the same time, even 
underlying such changes, some emphasis is 
almost always a marked one in the great 
religious characters of history. And any 
really useful study of religion must be a 
more or less objective examination of its 
actual outcome in human life. 

Emotional types of religious life have 
made so deep an impress on men's minds 
that a superficial student of historical re- 
ligion easily falls into the mistake of as- 
suming that religion is wholly emotional. 
Even Schleiermacher was disposed to call 
religion the feeling of dependence, and to 
minimize the intellectual and pragmatic 
elements. This is false psychology. There 
can be no emotional reaction without in- 
tellectual and pragmatic elements; and 
when it is once recognized that the religious 
reaction has all three elements as necessary 
constituent parts it becomes evident that 
it is a matter of emphasis and that emotion 



RELIGIOUS TYPES 111 

is far from being always the main emphasis 
in the reaction. 

However, it is true that religion is 
strongly emotional because religion is the 
most fundamental and powerful impulse 
in human life, not even the sexual being 
more important, for it persists long after 
the sexual impulse has lost its primary 
place, and it has been able to inhibit and 
regulate the sexual life as no other impulse 
has been able to do. Now, all impulses, to 
have power, must heighten the emotional 
life, and so religion has concerned itself in 
all ages with the various emotional expres- 
sions. It is at this point, indeed, that the 
close and often confusing relation between 
the sexual and religious impulses must be 
studied. The suggestion that the essence 
of the religious impulse is submission, and 
that this is also central in the sexual life 
on one side, will not bear examination. 
Religion is not predominantly submissive, 
and the central thing in the sexual life is 
not submission either. 

Religion is in large chapters of its life 
almost brutally masculine. Judaism, Mo- 
hammedanism, Brahmanism, Puritanism, 



lis RELIGION AND LIFE 

Confucianism are intensely masculine and 
virile religions, whose very fault is that 
they fail duly to minister to great impera- 
tive needs of a race rising in refinement, 
and so all have produced counterpoises, 
such as Christianity, mystic sects, Bud- 
dhism, evangelicalism, and other gentler 
types of teaching. 

The emotional religious life has sought 
expression, as was natural, in forms of art. 
It links itself so readily and so completely 
with such expressions that it is often 
difficult, or even impossible, for the wor- 
shiper to know whether what moves him 
in the cathedral, in the music, the appeal 
of words, and the beauty of the ritual is 
aesthetic sensuous enjoyment or the stirring 
of the religious impulse. Hence there has 
frequently arisen a kind of jealousy on the 
part of religion of art, as in a sense a rival 
and coclaimant for the soul. Judaism sup- 
pressed painting and sculpture and Mo- 
hammedanism followed the same desert 
impulse in its emphasis upon a sterner 
ritual. Puritanism has carried on the 
same war. But when this has happened 
the religious life has simply chosen other 



RELIGIOUS TYPES 113 

forms of art such as poetry, or language, or 
architecture, and thus emotional religion 
has poured out its longings in psalm or 
music, in splendid ritual or ornate mosque, 
for the aesthetic religious temperament 
when religiously stirred must respond along 
the lines of its inner nature, and to sup- 
press the longing completely would be 
simple suicide. It is equally irrational to 
expect all to enter into the highly developed 
aesthetical religious expressions with any 
great zeal. Even highly emotional persons 
have often an extremely primitive sestheti- 
cal development. Wildly emotional life 
among African Negroes finds expression 
in the most primitive rhythmic dances, 
whereas in some cases over refinement will 
make it impossible for some religious life 
to find any adequate expression in art of 
its deeper life. 

Whatever other elements there are in 
aesthetic enjoyment, one distinguishing fea- 
ture is the resolute demand for the harmony 
of the separate factors of the situation. 
The materials of the building, its lines and 
spaces, must express unity and harmony 
and satisfy us by their suggesting a unify- 



114 RELIGION .\XD LITE 

ing of the various discords. In music a 
simple taste is gratified by a sizzestion of 
pleasing tones in some sinipiy repeated 
meiody. More hirr'y sophisticated musi- 
caJ tastes must find the disnarmonies built 
up into elaborate unities tliat seem dis- 
harmony to tlie simpler mind. It takes 
studv and Ions careful anaJvsis for anvone 
but a musical expert to find the unity and 
harmony of one of Max Roger's pro- 
ductions. 

The emotional religious t}"p^ demands 
hamionv and unitv maoo '.'isih-o and real. 
It finds inspiration and coniiori and fellow- 
ship with God in the order and beau:y cf 
cathedral sendee or great painting of re- 
Hgious devo:o:nal import, or in the music 
of Bach and Beethoven in their loos: re- 
hgious moods. It was simply inevitable 
that the evangelical revival should at last 
reach a class at first repelled by its crude- 
ness. and give ^lIs the r::uol:s::c re\'ival of 
the las: vears of the Ornvorv -'ust gone. 
This ritualistic revival at first are loei :r/.y 
one branch of the Protestant Church, but 
it has now extended to nearly all, and 
aesthetic order and more elaborate and 



RELIGIOUS TYPES 115 

ornate worship is almost the note of the 
present generation. The feehngs of many 
who have no great sympathy with this 
form of aesthetic expression are in danger 
of a certain outrage from the prevalent 
tendency, for, after all, even the emo- 
tional type of religious life does not always 
by any means seek this outward expression 
of its desire for unity and harmony. 

There is also what may be loosely called 
a mystic type of emotional religion in 
which the unity sought is thought of as 
actually one of substance. We feel our 
life is torn and distraught, disrupted and 
discordant. We seek in God a final unity 
and harmony. The whole emotional sit- 
uation passionately cries out for inward 
peace. Augustine has given classical form 
to this demand of the soul for God, and 
knowledge that only in God does the soul 
find rest. Such mystic emotionalism may 
find expression in art, but in classic mys- 
ticism it has almost scorned the outward 
and visible as hindrances to that intimate 
fellowship which it craves in an actually 
losing of ourselves in God. Thus in Tauler 
and in German Theology the mystic com- 



116 RELIGION AND LIFE 

munion is figured as such identification 
and unity of substance that only the 
mystic rapture and ecstatic vision of love 
can give us the final assurance that we 
need of eternal rest in Endless and Un- 
speakable Divinity. All art is powerless, 
all music vain in attempting any expres- 
sion of this religious longing and all- 
absorbing faith. 

And he who does not reckon with this 
faith as a constantly recurring and tre- 
mendously powerful factor in human so- 
ciety is blind to the forces that are creating 
and recreating humanity. Just as critical 
and skeptical philosophy has finished its 
work of once and for all banishing mys- 
ticism from the field of rationalized life, 
up it crops with new explosive force to 
defy under all conditions the sentence of 
death by its tremendous and self -evidencing 
vitality. 

Those who are not mystics must seek to 
understand the hunger of the soul which is 
so often ministered to by mysticism. The 
craving for unity with God, and ultimate 
harmony with the universe, has been a 
factor in the religious life of all ages, and 



RELIGIOUS TYPES 117 

represents to many the only ideal high 
enough and permanent enough to give 
sufficient motive for hfe and its activity. 
That it has at times sunk into unethical 
quietism can hardly be denied, just as 
aesthetic religious life has often ended in 
unethical formalism, show, and even in 
irreligious sensuousness. At the same time 
it has, at times, proved a most virile and 
unconquerable element in the lifting man 
above the seen and the temporal and giv- 
ing him strength and poise for such work 
as Bernard had to do, or Augustine himself 
accomplished. 

Byzantine art has probably been se- 
riously underestimated because so much of 
the best of it was swept away in the Mo- 
hammedan flood. There is so much in 
that which remains to us of real religious 
feeling that we gladly believe that, with 
all its faults, Byzantine religious life was 
not wholly swallowed up in the stiff 
formalism and pious phrase-making under 
which it was burdened, and which it 
handed over as a woeful heritage to its 
daughters, the Russian Church and the 
churches of the Orient. It is from this 



118 RELIGION AND LIFE 

emotional side that, we believe, Byzantine 
Christianity can alone be understood. The 
symbols and creeds that are repeated so 
glibly and that are held on to with such 
fanatical zeal are merely war banners 
made traditionally sacred by the blood of 
past conflicts. The intellectual interest in 
them seems wholly gone. ^Esthetic and 
mystic interests seem to have been the 
overwhelming factors in the life of the 
old Greek, or, more properly, Hellenistic, 
Christianity. These are the elements that 
entered so potently into Neoplatonic re- 
ligious life, and when a crass unaesthetic 
materialism "^gains ground among us there 
arise protests, often crude enough indeed, 
but yet effective protests in the life of New 
Thought movements, Theosophy, Christian 
Science, and similar appeals. These are 
not to be met and conquered by intellectual 
analysis, or dismissed with ridicule, scorn, 
and laughter, but to be sympathetically 
studied and understood, and their protest 
registered in our lives and our message; for 
the emotional and intuitional temperaments 
crave satisfaction in the realization of their 
ideal, and in some way this craving must be 



RELIGIOUS TYPES 119 

related to any answer we try to give to 
the eager questioning of life. 

To a religious life in New England that 
had been intellectually analyzed into tat- 
ters Phillips Brooks came with a note of 
emotional and intuitional directness that 
in many instances, without changing the 
intellectual preconceptions in the least, 
changed the lives of hundreds thirsting for 
the religious life in forms far removed from 
intellectual analysis, but ministering to the 
parched and dried places of the soul's life 
emotionally un watered. The emotional de- 
mands thus ministered to were various in 
the last degree, and ran the gamut from de- 
sire for ornate service to mystic satisfac- 
tion in emotional surrender; but even many 
far outside the immediate influence of this 
religious directness felt the new power and 
significance of the personality. For religion 
is power, not logical process. 

The second great type of religious per- 
sonality is that of intellectual emphasis. 
The mind finds its religious satisfaction in 
holding a great and satisfying dogmatic 
system, and in working out the details of 
the system into authoritative self-con- 



120 RELIGION AND LIFE 

sistency. Frequent as has been the con- 
flict between "science" and "dogmatic 
theology" — for so the quarrel should be 
described rather than between "religion" 
and science — the resemblance between this 
type of religious thinker and the great 
speculative scientists is striking and il- 
luminating. The intellectual religious t}^e 
seeks fulfillment for his ideal in a com- 
plete and intellectually satisfying system. 
L^sually he regards this as based upon 
past authority, but the really great dog- 
matic theologian has always rewritten his 
system entire; it is only the epigonen who 
take over the svstem from another hand. 
Augustine, Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, Cal- 
vin, among the older scholastics, and Owen, 
Jonathan Edwards, and Dorner among the 
more modern ones, have thus found rest 
for their religious faith in great systems 
of thought which may excite our merely 
aesthetic admiration, much as do great 
cathedrals, or wondrous symphonic poems 
from some great musician. This intel- 
lectual dogmatic impulse is akin to the 
speculative scientific interest that presses 
for a self -consistent and therefore satisf^dng 



RELIGIOUS TYPES 1^1 

interpretation of the world in terms of mat- 
ter or energy or of electrons. 

On the lower plane of everyday life, 
where most of us live, this type finds the 
deepest religious experience linked with 
a system of thought, it may be Roman 
Catholic popular theology, or evangelical 
Arminianism, or Calvinism subjected to 
much evangelical reinterpretation; but the 
system looms up as the important thing, 
and the highest religious experience with- 
out these systematic formulations is almost 
unthinkable. To such a mind mysticism 
seems shadowy and unreal, and all aesthetic 
emotional expression as vague sentimen- 
tality. Such a mind rejoices in positive and 
definite statements of ''truth," and craves 
dogmatic and final sharpness in all defini- 
tion. In the acceptance of a system from 
the past and taking religious delight in it 
such a mind is hardly aware of the way it 
recreates the system for personal use, and 
finds deepest satisfaction in the way the 
old system can be stretched to cover new 
situations utterly unthought of by the 
first formulator. Mohammedan and Con- 
fucian theology share with Roman Catholic 



m RELIGION AND LIFE 

scholasticism and Puritan theology the gen- 
eral strength and weakness of this type 
of religious development. The strength is 
apparent in history. The men who have 
responded to the religious appeal in this 
form swept away Byzantian mysticism and 
aesthetic formalism, and covered their 
churches with the whitewash of the 
mosque. They linked Europe in an in- 
tellectual imperialism that at last defied 
Mohammedanism, and again in turn knit 
the souls of a band of reformers so to- 
gether that they defied the forces of 
Roman Catholic reaction, and made Hol- 
land, Scotland, and Switzerland the bul- 
warks of the Reformation. 

This intellectual religious type is not of 
necessity in any sense truly philosophical. 
Even when allied with some popular sys- 
tem of philosophy, the philosophy is not 
the main organizing interest. For this in- 
tellectual type one goes to the great specu- 
lative religious thinkers, who find the 
expressions for their religious needs only 
in speculations that far transcend any au- 
thoritative system, and whose note is rather 
an overwhelming religious curiosity than a 



RELIGIOUS TYPES 123 

demand for intellectual rest in a system. 
Thus Origen, Abelard, and Pascal illus- 
trate to us a type of intellectual religious 
development found in various shades in 
all vital religions, but which marks par- 
ticularly the restless speculative life of 
India. Such temperaments start often 
from an assumed authority as final, but 
only that from this temporary resting 
place a new quest may be made for still 
larger and deeper truth. Within scholas- 
ticism this temperament soon makes itself 
felt. Duns Scotus and Zwingli are, perhaps, 
good examples of a type which, in spite of 
sincere acceptance of a dogmatic system, 
really is interested far more deeply in a 
speculative system, which, in the last 
analysis, outweighs the dogmatic. 

The third type may be called that of 
religious pragmatism. Action is here the 
highest expression of religious devotion. It 
is often fashionable to sum up the reli- 
gious life in "doing," but, after all, doing 
never can be more than one outcome of 
thinking and feeling. To love God and 
our neighbor will result in appropriate ac- 
tion, but we must think God, and must 



IM RELIGION AND LIFE 

come into some emotional contact with our 
neighbor before we can either love the one 
or help the other. At the same time on 
large ranges of the religious life the actual 
expression of religious idealism is only to 
be found in the activity of the life. The 
activity may be thrown into relief by an 
intellectual background; the work is done 
''out of principle," or it may have an emo- 
tional element: "I feel it is right to do 
this or that," but the essence is the doing 
of some work that has a religious inspira- 
tion as its motive and purpose. Great as 
Luther was both intellectually and emo- 
tionally, he yet is really of this active 
pragmatic type. He saw in work the cen- 
ter of religious devotion. He was before 
everything else a man of action. His keen 
intellect easily found reasons for his ac- 
tivity, but it did not rest upon any intel- 
lectual analysis. His emotional life was 
profound, and his sermons and hymns are 
masterpieces of emotional religious expres- 
sion, but again they are the by-products of 
his unceasing activity. The year at the 
Wartburg was filled with intellectual work 
of a high order and great variety, but 



RELIGIOUS TYPES 125 

Luther himself felt that he was '*an idler" 
(Miissiggaenger). He was lost without the 
active work of church organization. His 
restless energy was continually finding new 
channels, and his practical organizing in- 
terest dominates both his intellectual and 
emotional life. Perhaps the same may be 
said as emphatically of John Knox, whose 
intellectual life was almost entirely subor- 
dinated to his political and social activity 
as a reorganizer, not only of the Scottish 
Church, but of Scottish life. To this type 
belongs also John Wesley. 

The more resolutely anyone faces the 
analysis of the actual religious lives that 
have made history, the more evident does 
it become that religious enthusiasm is of 
the whole nature, and that it cannot be 
confined even mainly to any one channel 
of expression. It has fructified and strength- 
ened human life along all the lines of its in- 
telligence, its emotions, and its activities. It 
is, in fact, a great and fundamental impulse, 
to ignore which is as unscientific as to refuse 
to examine the pressure of the air, or to try 
and believe that history can be explained 
without study of its ideals. 



1^6 RELIGION AND LIFE 

THE LITERATURE 

James's "Varieties of Religious Experience,** 
Royce's chapter on "Mysticism'* in his "The World 
and the Individual.** But above all, religious biog- 
raphy, and especially autobiography — Augustine*s 
"Confessions,** Laud's "Vindication,** John Wesley *s 
"Journal,** McGiffert*s "Martin Luther,** etc. 



CHAPTER IX 

Ethics and Religion 

The relation of ethics to religion is a 
subject of constantly recurring debate. Of 
the intimate relationship in the past there 
can be no question. In early stages of 
culture all conduct was linked with reli- 
gion, and when religions become obedience 
to custom without ethical content they 
are generally seen to be slowly decaying. 
Science by its very nature will never be 
content to have religion and ethics stand 
as final and primitive impulses baflBing all 
analysis. All we can say now is that no 
satisfactory analysis has yet been made. 
The ethical and the religious impulses are 
the material with which we deal, and all 
attempts so far to resolve them into still 
more simple impulses have proved unsatis- 
factory. The theory of evolution, with its 
law of the survival of that which proves 
useful in the struggle for life, seemed at 
one time to promise much aid, but it is 
now seen that it does not and cannot 

127 



128 RELIGION AND LIFE 

deal with origins, and that somewhere Hfe 
passes from an unethical to an ethical, and 
from a nonreligious to a religious plane, but 
when or how we as yet do not know. It 
is often forgotten that modern science con- 
sists largely in describing the unfamiliar in 
images borrowed from the familiar, and 
that this is justified by the fact that in that 
way we come into possession of power to 
handle and master the unfamiliar, but that 
it in no way removes the initial mystery. 
Somewhere the mind baffled in its analysis 
rests upon the assumption of a Law, or a 
Universe or System of Things, or an Ab- 
solute or an Ultimate Being, or an Infinite. 
These are all terms that express simply our 
definite finite limitations. The human 
mind at this stage of our development is 
simply not in a position to either set 
limits or discover them to the universe, 
nor can we in any way actually conceive 
an unlimited universe. Our mental analyt- 
ical machinery breaks down in attempting 
the task. Not that we will ever give it 
up; we will forever attempt what is now 
for us impossible, and grow mentally in 
attempting it. 



ETHICS AND RELIGION 129 

It is in this unexplored and baffling 
world of being that faith says to man's 
soul that God dwells. This unexplored 
realm seemed to primitive man very near 
and relatively comprehensible. For the 
modern man mystery has as often taken 
the place of supposed knowledge as actual 
knowledge has taken the place of sup- 
posed mystery. Every child and every 
savage will say that matter is quite simple 
and knowable. Anything hard and ex- 
tended is "matter." The modern man 
knows that we know nothing about any 
ultimate "hard" and "extended" matter. 
We may talk for convenience of "dead," 
"motionless" matter, but there is no dead, 
motionless matter. The picture of our 
world of "hard" and "extended" matter 
that seems at present best to answer our 
needs is a picture of infinitesimal atoms 
made up of corpuscles dashing about at 
speeds that if in straight lines would carry 
them in four seconds or so to the sun, and 
with a potential energy that would rock 
the world were it exerted without the 
counter-balance of like energy. To say 
that such a picture removes mystery or 



130 RELIGION AND LIFE 

increases the simplicity of the world for 
the ordinary man is absurd. Its only justi- 
fication lies in its enabling the experimen- 
tal scientist to handle better his systematic 
experience. 

This universe, or system of things, is, 
however, constantly pressing down upon 
us. How are we related to it.^ What does 
it mean for us.^ Is it our friend or our 
enemy? Religious faith has from the be- 
ginning of culture evidently moved men to 
relate themselves to this world about them. 
This faith has with steady consistency 
maintained that God was as personal as we 
are, and that God or gods governed this 
world beyond us, in a higher but analogous 
way to our governance of our smaller 
world. Under all forms of faith, from the 
crudest polytheism to the most spiritual 
and refined metaphysical pantheism, re- 
ligious faith has interpreted that universe 
^'beyond" and yet *'within" in images bor- 
rowed from our own most inmost expe- 
rience. That our several interpretations are 
final can no more be claimed for them than 
that the physical theory of electrons as the 
ultimate of matter can be hailed as final. 



ETHICS AND RELIGION 131 

The justification in the one case as in the 
other is the mastery they have given us 
and still give us of our inward and deepest 
experience. 

Religion has not explained our universe 
any more than science has, but it has co- 
ordinated it, and in ever more satisfying 
form enabled us to conceive of it as ra- 
tional and purposeful. The intellectual 
formulae in which it does this are as fleet- 
ing as the terminology of any systematic 
and growing science or any fashionable 
philosophy. Even when names remain like 
"God," the "soul," and "immortality," the 
actual meanings of these words for Emanuel 
Kant are not those of the childlike faith 
of a simple-hearted peasant. What is the 
same is the effectiveness of the faith in 
both cases to give strength and significance 
to the life. And the reality of the faith is 
not attested by the degree of rationality it 
may attain to, but by this effectiveness in 
sustaining life's purpose; hence the uni- 
versal experience that faith is known by 
its works and not by its formulae. And 
when any intellectual analysis of faith has 
so distracted us from its real content that 



132 RELIGION AND LIFE 

it ceases to sustain us, we must become 
again as little children, not by acceptance 
of now impossible formulations of faith, 
but by ''being born again" in our whole 
relation to life in God. Here again all 
religious teaching is at one with human 
experience. 

From the beginning of human experience 
man is born into close human relationships. 
The great imperatives of the universe 
swayed its life long before man appeared. 
Now, in the conscious human life these 
imperatives appear as categorical demands 
upon him, with the seeming alternative of 
disobedience. The mother should love her 
babe, but she may be an "unnatural" 
mother and refuse. Cain should love and 
protect Abel, but he may be an unnatural 
brother and murder him. In their complex 
social forms these imperatives have a 
history. Even the simplest social moral- 
ity is the product of an age-long process. 
A long evolution may be traced in such 
an idea as ''murder." The experiences of 
the man and the woman and child in the 
simplest group life give more and more 
elaborate meaning to the great imperative 



ETHICS AND RELIGION 133 

that founded the family in the beginning. 
Man rises daily from the brute to a divine 
companionship with this eternal mandate. 
Nor does he separate his experiences in the 
family from his experiences with the world. 
The complex, invisible world which he 
peoples with gods and demons is the ulti- 
mate sanction for his conduct in the social 
group. God watches over him and sees 
him, and when Cain slays his brother God 
tells him that his brother's blood crieth 
against him from the ground. His field of 
ethics is never really separated from his 
religious faith. 

As time goes on man formulates his re- 
ligion and his ethics, and these formula- 
tions have frequently very different origin 
and purpose, and in our modern world 
have often flown very far apart; and 
to-day many of the debates about the 
relation of religion to ethics would be 
more fruitful if they were begun and car- 
ried on as debates upon the relation of 
religious formulations and varied systems 
of ethics. For our own scientific purpose 
we must tear religions and systems of 
ethics apart. We must often speak as if 



134 RELIGION AND LIFE 

the imperatives behind them both were 
separable. We must consider and weigh 
the vaHdity of these imperatives, and ask 
ourselves even such radical questions as 
whether or no there is a place "on the 
other side and beyond morality," and 
whether what we know as religious ex- 
perience may not be a vast delusion. But 
in the long run man's experience is no 
more compartmental than his psychology, 
and sooner or later ethics and religion will 
both relate themselves to the great un- 
seen world. Man interprets personally, and 
knows both as above him and yet of his 
most inmost being. 

And nowhere has ethics been more real 
and vital than when brought into closest 
and most intimate touch with the funda- 
mental religious enthusiasm; and, on the 
other hand, the modern man is coming 
more and more to judge religion, not so 
much by its intellectual self -consistency or 
rational content as by its ethical effective- 
ness in the lives of those who experience 
its power. As the power of the ethical 
nature is its immediate and almost ex- 
plosive reaction, often baffling analysis, so 



ETHICS AND RELIGION 136 

the power of the religious life is this same 
tremendous compulsion that links man with 
an unseen purpose far higher and greater 
than even he himself can describe. No one 
can really rationalize the life of Luther or 
explain its power; and still more awed and 
abashed do we stand before the religious 
mystery of Jesus Christ. And at these 
highest points we feel that conduct cannot 
be separated from the religious impulse, 
and that religion's highest and noblest and 
most self-evidencing power is displayed in 
the realm of everyday life, and that he 
who cannot love his brother whom he has 
seen cannot claim to love God whom he 
has not seen. 

Moreover, it is in these imperatives we 
see most clearly the workings of the uni- 
verse, whose infinite or transcendent life 
breaks in upon our life of phenomenal ex- 
perience. Thus God becomes personal to 
us, because we realize that the personal 
note is the highest thing that gives men 
and women character and value. The 
imperative "Thou shalt" opens our eyes to 
the fact that God is righteousness. And 
love as revealed in the divine human ex- 



1S6 RELIGION AND LIFE 

perience opens our eyes to the fact that 
God is love; and when, therefore, Jesus 
proclaims God as a lo\Tag Father, and does 
so in wondering reproach that we did not 
long grasp this fact before, we hail it as 
the highest reHgious revelation of God; and 
when Jesus lives out that faith, we gladly 
sav, "Mv Lord, mv God,'' for this love has 
become now a real human experience, and 
we know God in Jesus Christ as lo^TQg, 
redeeming, and sa^4ng the world. 

Moreover, our religious faith finds its 
fullest exercise in its ethics. We go forth 
as coworkers with God to transform human 
life into the image of God, not as a tran- 
scendental "'Infinite.'' nor vet a *'Power not 
ourselves making for righteousness," nor 
the great ''Unknown,'" but into the image 
of God as we have seen him in Christ 
Jesus. Of course our vision even then is 
limited bv our ignorance and ethical in- 
competence. T\'e only see as in a bronze 
mirror, and know only in part; but the 
most pressing imperative of our lives is 
that to relate ourselves to this life in and 
above our world, and to manifest its spirit- 
ual and moral glorv', by sharing in it and 



ETHICS AND RELIGION 137 

revealing it in our little measure as Jesus 
has revealed it in such satisfying com- 
pleteness, that we may be one with the 
Father as Jesus is one with God, and we 
with him. 

At the same time for many the religious 
source, as faith believes, is often not the 
conscious source of good men's ethics. The 
religious relation of their ethical life to 
anything that can be called God is want- 
ing. This has many reasons. Sometimes 
men have intellectually rejected the formu- 
lation of religious faith so completely that 
the faith has gone with the formulation. 
This is often the fault of religious teachers 
who have taught men falsely that to touch 
one iota of the formulation of religious 
faith was to destroy the faith. Thus Jesus 
and Paul were rejected as dangerous re- 
ligious innovators because they dared to 
question the accepted religious formula- 
tions. The false teachers are often ac- 
cepted at their word, and when some part 
of a religious system is seen to be intel- 
lectually impossible the whole system is 
given over. Sometimes the religious na- 
ture is not recognized and is starved, as a 



138 RELIGION AND LIFE 

man may starve his musical sense, or his 
mathematical genius, or his social soul. 
We may destroy even high capacity for 
certain activities by simply letting them 
alone. Sometimes the man makes a crass 
mistake, and he is, without knowing it, 
serving God under some other name, but 
because he does not use the conventional 
name thinks he rejects, and is thought to 
reject God. According to Jesus at least, 
the moral life is a better index to the 
relationship with God than professions of 
belief, for, although Jesus demanded also 
professions of faith, what must always be 
present to our mind is the fact that pro- 
fessions of faith may be lifeless conformity 
to group type, and that denials may be 
vital attempts to relate the life to the 
Divine Life above us. 

Both in science and in religion, in 
aesthetics" and in ethics, the formulations 
are constantly changing, and timid souls 
think that because the familiar phrases are 
challenged or are gone, no science, no re- 
ligion, no aesthetics, and no ethics are left, 
whereas in truth often the older formula- 
tions had served their day and now had 



ETHICS AND RELIGION 139 

to be gotten rid of that the old truth 
might more clearly be expressed. Thus 
John Wesley cleared the ground for a new 
movement which his critics thought was 
the overthrow of all religion and the re- 
jection of all common sense. 

He is most free who feels the imperial 
pressure of a categorical imperative to 
know as far as in him lies his world, to do 
as far as in him lies what is right and true, 
and to relate himself as far as he can to 
God, the Spirit of all truth, as we see God 
in the face of Christ Jesus. 



THE LITERATURE 

The volumes of Hastings's "Dictionary of Re- 
ligion and Ethics" (five published 1912) will be 
found to contain a great deal of material. See 
also Palmer's "The Field of Ethics." Spencer's 
"Data of Ethics" presents his view of the relation- 
ship. Contrast with this Paul Carus's "Kant and 
Spencer." Compare also Smyth's "Christian Eth- 
ics." The work of Kant upon the metaphysics of 
religion has been the starting point for nearly 
all modern discussions of this question. Other 
conclusions will perhaps be reached from those of 
the chapter if the student follows Spinoza, Schleier- 
macher, and Caird's interpretation of Hegel. 



CHAPTER X 

Religion and the State 

The present attitude of the state, that 
is, of a community poKtically organized, 
to the church, or rehgion organized, would 
have been quite unthinkable before Locke 
and the rationalism of that day. Even the 
humanists, and men who, like Hobbes, had 
no dogmatic belief, felt that religion was 
essential to the very existence of a political 
state. To-day even where the church is 
established by law, the actual separation 
of the two forms of life is really complete. 
And the assumption is readily made that 
religion has lost its significance for the 
political organization. When the Reforma- 
tion gave religious impetus to the humanis- 
tic movement, and freed men's minds from 
the bondage of authority — and it is note- 
worthy that only a religious movement was 
strong enough to do this — no one really 
contemplated a separation of the two 
forms of organization. Luther expected 

the German princes to enforce true reli- 

140 



RELIGION AND THE STATE 141 

gion and to guard the church. Calvin 
expected the church to guard and really 
guide the state. Hobbes expected the 
state to formulate and enforce an orthodox 
faith, nominal conformity to which would 
give inward freedom. 

The case of the United States, with its 
almost complete separation of church and 
state, was rather an historical necessity 
because of the inability of any one eccle- 
siastical organization to represent the na- 
tional life than the outcome of any theory. 
The New England states had, as a matter 
of fact, the beginnings of a state church, 
and only the fact that the episcopacy was 
almost wholly tory in its sympathies pre- 
vented it from claiming state support, or 
it might readily enough have become. the 
church of some state, or even the nation. 
This was not to be, and from now on it is 
likely that separation between these two 
types of organization will be more and 
more complete. 

Why.? For the simple reason that we 
are seeing daily more clearly that the 
purpose of an organization is what should 
determine its life and character, and that 



14^ RELIGION AND LIFE 

the purpose of a church is one and the 
purpose of any poHtical organization is 
another. A Free Mason's lodge might con- 
ceivably take charge of the musical in- 
terests of a community, but it has no 
special fitness for so doing. An art acad- 
emy attracting artistic Masons and artistic 
non-Masons will do their work much better 
and unhampered by traditions with a quite 
different history. The community is grad- 
ually realizing that in organization there is 
elimination of waste, and much greater 
potential mastery over our world than in 
unorganized units, and that the clearer and 
more definite the aim the more power 
resides in the organization. The state has 
nothing mysterious about it. It is human 
life politically organized to enable us to 
live together richly and in peace. The 
form and power of the political organiza- 
tion is a matter of social expediency. And 
all states have divine right precisely as any 
college or academy, any business corpora- 
tion or social club has divine right. They 
are all ordained of God for their several 
purposes, and so far as the purpose is a 
legitimate one no real Protestant should 



RELIGION AND THE STATE 143 

call any of them unholy or unclean. All 
forms of organization, ecclesiastical, polit- 
ical, educational, commercial, social, or 
artistic, have their history in human life 
and its social needs, and all are alike sub- 
ject to the laws of efficiency and expe- 
diency. It is a matter, therefore, of 
experience and social wisdom how far the 
community organized politically shall sub- 
sidize art, education, and ecclesiastical 
organizations to promote religion. No 
community has as yet refused support to 
such organizations. The churches of the 
United States receive an enormous sum in 
the remission of taxes. Some time this 
may be withdrawn, but at present even 
those who have no personal sympathy 
with the aims of one or all of these eccle- 
siastical organizations still regard it as 
socially desirable, apparently, to render this 
exceedingly great aid; and so long as this 
aid is accepted every church should feel 
itself in no way a private and personal 
institution, but a servant of the com- 
munity which supports it. It is under the 
most solemn obligations to pay its way 
in service, and to render any and all 



144 RELIGION AND LIFE 

service it can render without unnecessary 
reduplication and waste. 

The political organization of a modern 
state unfits it in many ways for giving 
religious and even moral instruction. Here 
the churches should render all the service 
they can, and become the organization 
through which the community expresses 
its will to religiously educate. Sometimes 
the community has not even undertaken 
to supply by its political organization 
machinery and support for other forms of 
education, and until it does the church, 
although in some ways not well adapted to 
do this work in the best way, may well 
enter the field to render this service, in 
God's name, to the community. Again, 
what will be the form of the service cannot 
be settled a priori. Only large and critically 
considered social experience can give us an 
answer. Already the churches are com- 
mitting to other organizations, such as the 
Young Men's Christian Association and so- 
cial settlements, work they cannot do as 
well as special organizations for these 
specific purposes can do them. These are 
as much divine institutions for their spe- 



RELIGION AND THE STATE 145 

cial form of service as churches are for 
theirs. We do not exalt the ecclesiastical 
organization by refusing providential char- 
acter to other organizations. For the 
Christian Protestant all life is sacred, and 
there are no secular affairs. 

What, therefore, separates the religious 
forms of the past from our own day is not 
the fact that the age is less religious — it is 
probably more religious — but the new out- 
look upon life, and the more or less clear- 
eyed recognition of the fact that God 
works in human forms, and expresses his 
life in the limited life of his children, and 
that these expressions are marked at every 
point by our ignorance and limitations. 
We have no ideal church government given 
to us from heaven with divine authority. 
We have authority given us from heaven 
to fit our organizations from generation to 
generation to the varied needs of men. 
The authority, therefore, of any organiza- 
tion is limited by its underlying purpose. 
The church has high authority for render- 
ing its peculiar service; it has no especial 
authority to dictate the forms of political 
organization or to limit the legitimate ac- 



146 RELIGION AND LIFE 

tivities of other organizations equally called 
with her to render their peculiar forms of 
service. Absolute and sharp delimitation is 
as impossible here as elsewhere. Human 
life is one, and the universe is one. To-day 
organic and inorganic chemistry are terms 
of convenience — the sharp distinction has 
been swept away. The complexity of 
human purpose is very great. The larger 
purpose often includes the smaller. At 
times there seem inevitable conflicts be- 
tween men's purposes, but at heart we all 
believe that a splendid and thoroughgoing 
unity binds together all our complex 
aims, and that in the fulfillment of our 
highest purpose alone does life gain its 
deepest significance. 

The religious man sees in his religion the 
relation of all his aims and hopes, ambi- 
tions and purposes to God's plan. He 
feels so personally linked with God that 
he knows something of that plan, and finds 
in the working out of God's plan for him- 
self and the world about him his highest 
joy and largest and most permanent sat- 
isfaction. 

In another respect the whole attitude 



RELIGION AND THE STATE 147 

toward what is rather unfortunately called 
* 'religious toleration" has changed. At one 
time the unity of the group was not only 
the most important element in its strength, 
but the religious organization was the most 
effective bond to secure that unity. To 
break that unity was to menace the group 
sohdarity, and even to-day group solidar- 
ity is realized as vastly important. The 
fiercest and most tragic war of recent 
times was waged to secure group solidarity. 
But no longer does any religious organiza- 
tion represent this effective bond. This is 
often a cause of surely somewhat thought- 
less lamentation. The bond that now 
holds groups together is that complex and 
undefinable thing we call group or national 
culture. It has, indeed, many elements, 
but no one of these elements can be called 
supreme. It is not language; Switzerland 
has three official tongues. It is not race; 
there are no satisfactory definitions of race. 
It is not law; the Roman and English em- 
pires have shown that various systems of 
law may be worked together. It is not any 
geographical term; for here again the 
strongest empires have defied geography. 



148 RELIGION AND LIFE 

Yet culture has all these elements, and 
among the most important is the religious 
life. It is not religious dogmas; these may- 
be common property of many cultures, as 
in Persia, Egypt, and Turkey, without giv- 
ing final shape to any. It is not religious 
cult or rite, but religious ideals. These 
may not be widely spread, or even every- 
where effective, any more than national 
painting or national music is within the 
scope of all. But these ideals lend tone 
and color to any national group, and it 
is impossible to understand Italy, France, 
China, Japan, or Russia without some 
knowledge of the religious ideals which 
give color and character to the whole 
national group life. What we call tolerance 
is the gradual recognition of the varied 
complexity in the group life, and the grow- 
ing experience of the far greater strength 
and purity of the higher elements of cul- 
ture when they have liberty to work and 
express themselves unhampered by the 
lower motive of external group unity; and, 
in point of fact, this is daily being seen 
more clearly, and men are coming to realize 
that the strongest group bond is not an 



RELIGION AND THE STATE 149 

external conformity to group type, but an 
inner kinship with an expanding cultural 
ideal. 

Tolerance has still the air of a claim to 
absolute knowledge, which, however, "tol- 
erates" error, while, in fact, the modern 
world is both farther away from any claim 
to absolute knowledge than any previous 
world of thought, and also more resolutely 
bent upon getting rid of error, and more 
intolerant of it. Again, it is our sense of 
the relative character of all our formula- 
tions that is making us more and more 
willing to learn all we can from any man 
of good will who seems perhaps to question 
our favorite formulations, but who also 
claims to have something worth our while 
to listen to. Thus in the political world 
we listen to men whose proposals contem- 
plate an entire reconstruction of our social 
order. We listen with doubt and a whole- 
some skepticism, but we listen. Once this 
was seemingly quite incompatible with any 
group solidarity; to-day we realize that 
freedom to hear and speak has strength- 
ened group solidarity. So also in the 
religious realm. We listen to Mohammed 



150 RELIGION AND LIFE 

and Buddha, not because we think them 
right, but because we realize that to under- 
stand them is our only way of meeting any 
error they proclaim or getting any truth 
they may present. Nor have our experi- 
ments in this catholicity worked badly. It 
has led, indeed, to much reformulation of 
religious statement, but it has allayed 
some of the bitterest and most effective 
opposition that religion has had to en- 
counter. To the faithful historian it has 
long been known that there never was an 
''age of faith," and that the seeming unity 
of religious organization on the basis of 
phrases and formulae never really repre- 
sented any vital unity, either intellectual 
or moral or religious. What could be the 
value of a religious unity with Leo X as its 
visible head? What could be the value of 
a religious unity that was dominated by 
Constantine or Henry the Eighth.^ Reli- 
gion as the highest in the scale of the 
imponderable higher values rests upon in- 
timate personal complex experiences, of 
which only the religious man can bear his 
testimony, and whose objective value can 
be measured only by the correspondence of 



RELIGION AND THE STATE 151 

his experiences with those of other men, and 
by the fruitfulness of his experience and in- 
terpretation of it in the ways of Ufe. When 
Paul and Luther and Wesley claim to have 
personal transforming experiences the world 
calls them insane. But others recognize 
the same elements in a smaller way in 
their own lives and accept their testimony, 
and see the fruitfulness of these experiences 
in strength for life, and in purification of 
conduct, and in new and vital relationships 
to the Unseen. It is open to anyone not 
having had any religious experience to deny 
its reality, as anyone never having had a 
musical rapture thinks coldly and con- 
temptuously of the enthusiastic musician. 
And the religious man can do little but live 
the religious life and proclaim as well as 
he may the source of its vitality. Hence 
we are willing to welcome in the name of 
religion anyone who seems to have had, 
even in strange dress and using unfamiliar 
formulae, a real religious insight, and who 
claims to have found in the phase of truth 
he presents strength and grace for life and 
death. 

The degeneracy of this attitude may 



152 RELIGION AND LIFE 

often be represented by a harmful and 
destructive indifference. Much boasted 
"tolerance" is simply mental inertia and 
moral indolence. The remedy is, however, 
not a return to narrow insistence upon any 
formulae, but a broad and strong emphasis 
upon the need of truth and the fatal char- 
acter of all indolently harbored untruth. 
Never was it more important for the life and 
soul of any of us that we should have clear 
and definite views of religious truth. We 
may not profess to cover the whole wide 
universe in the sweep and scope of our 
confession of faith. But it should be 
sharply and clearly our own confession of 
faith and personal hope. It will be a 
growing confession of faith as our reli- 
gious experience widens and quickens, and 
as our own intellectual life changes and 
deepens. It will be humbly held, because 
we are so easily misled, and it will try to 
include the values in life that we have 
found our own need of in actual struggle 
toward higher things. 

Yet this personal and ever more or less 
private formulation of our faith from time 
to time has a quite different meaning from 



RELIGION AND THE STATE 153 

equally important social confessions of 
faith. These can never be more than a 
compromise. Two persons who think they 
really believe the same words are either 
simply ignorant of the limitation of human 
speech, or have repeated formulae they have 
not weighed and made their own. All 
definitions are delimitations for special pur- 
pose, and can have value only when we 
know the purpose. For practical purposes 
we use words with general but indefinite 
agreement as to their significance. Social 
creeds are general expressions of agree- 
ment. The more exactly and scientifically 
they are expressed the more disagreement 
will they evoke. With increasing intelli- 
gence and developed personality it is 
becoming increasingly impossible to find 
any set of words intelligent men will 
accept without the right to use the words 
in their own sense. The social creed is a 
broad platform expressing the general pur- 
pose of the creedal body, and the limits of 
disagreement are always various. The per- 
sonal element, with its sense of the need of 
clear understanding of individual position on 
the one hand, and the sense of unity of aim 



154. RELIGION AND LIFE 

underlying all differences on the other, 
makes it a delicate question what are the 
limits of cooperation. 

One serious difficulty is that the answer 
to the question, ''Have I a right within an 
organization?" has been too much placed 
on a legal basis, and where there is doubt 
it has been fought out upon merely techni- 
cal and legal grounds. The answer should be 
a social answer, but should be given on the 
broadest lines of social expediency. It 
would be death to any organization to 
refuse to tolerate any variations in opinion. 
The holding of a creedal position intel- 
lectually may leave one quite disloyal to 
the real purpose of the creedal organiza- 
tion, whereas vn.de difference of intellec- 
tual judgments may give ^dtality and 
adaptive power to the society. The broad 
lines of usefulness within the organization 
for the advancement of its main end are 
the onlv safe ones for determination of 
any member's rights within the organiza- 
tion. Even on these lines mistakes would 
be made, but probably far less often than 
under past and existing conditions. 

There would thus be a constant demand 



RELIGION AND THE STATE 155 

for reexamination and revision of all plat- 
forms, and intellectual inertia would be 
disturbed and made anxious. The fantas- 
tic notion that we can stand still and 
cease to grow without dying is still wide- 
spread. It is troublesome to reclothe anew 
from time to time our faith in new 
formulse, but just as we have to daily feed 
and reclothe our bodies, so from time to 
time we must feed and reclothe our faith, 
and a strong, healthy faith needs constant 
exercise and constant reclothing. 



Thus faith interpenetrates all life. Its 
meaning for life is all-important and all- 
embracing. Those who turn away from 
the subject in ignorant indifference know 
no real history and miss the clue to man's 
deepest psychology, and the key to the 
mystery of life and death. That faith will 
ever die is unthinkable. The courage and 
poise real faith gives to the human life will 
make it triumphant amid all seeming de- 
feats, and as in the past so always when 
men most scornfully nail it to a cross, 
its resurrection is assured in still greater 
power to reorganize and quicken again 



156 RELIGION AND LIFE 

human life for divinest mission; the revela- 
tion of God incarnate in a human hfe fit to 
be called the temple of the living God; 
human lives reorganized as the sons and 
daughters of the Most High. 



THE LITERATURE 

The relation of the church to the state has a 
whole library to itself, and yet an adequate treat- 
ment from the modern point of view is lacking. 
Dunning discusses the matter briefly in his "Polit- 
ical Theories," Volume II; especially see pages 365, 
366. Geffcken's work is translated from the German 
under the title "Church and State" (1877). A 
short article in the Encyclopsedia Britannica (XI) on 
Estabhshment is an excellent sketch of the his- 
tory, but the bibliography is meager. 



INDEX 



Ab^lard, 123 

Abraham, 95 

Absolute, the, 128 

Ages, Middle, 89 

Agnosticism, 104 

American, citizenship, 99 

Amphyctionic Council, 31 

AnaboHsm, 51 

Ancestor worship, 27 

Animism, 28, 72 

Ansehn, 120 

Aquinas, Thomas, 12 

Arabic scholarship, 87 

Architecture, 37 

Aristocracy, military, 86 

Arminianism, 121 

Art, 37 

Assisi, Francis of, 61 

Astarte, 35, 46 

Astronomy, astrology and, 

35 
Augustine, 115 
Autosuggestion, 57 



Baal, priests of, 57 
Babylon, 43, 85 
Bach, 114 
Balkan states, 4 
Beckmesser, 59 
Beethoven, 77 
Bichloride of mercury, 19 



Blood, relationship, 96 
Brahmanism, 111 
Brooks, Phillips, 119 
Browning, Robert, 100 
Buddha, 62 
Buddhism, 2, 92 
Buddhism, rise of, 9 
Byzantine art, 117 



Cain, story of, 95 
Calvin, 64 
Caste, priestly, 40 
Cathedral, 112 
Certainty, mathematical, 13 
Chant, Gregorian, 37 
Character, social and per- 
sonal, 24 
China, 102 
Christianity, 9, 86 
Christianity, Byzantine, 118 
Christianity, China, 43 
Church, Roman, 10 
Church and state, 97 
Cicero, time of, 9 
Clerics, 48 
Comte, 28 

Conduct, religion and, 101 
Confederacy, Indian, 31 
Conformity, 52 
Confucius, 58, 92 
Cosmogony, science and, 37 



157 • 



158 



INDEX 



Creeds, 153 
Crusades, 92, 100 
Cycles, vegetative and as- 
tronomical, 35 
Cynicism, 10 



Damascus, 64 
Dance, 37 
Darwin, 36 
Death, 28 

Definitions, value of, 1 
Delphic, 31 
Democracies, 85 
Democracy, 23 
Democracy, English, 11 
Democracy, superstition and, 

6 
Despotism, 23 
Determinism, 67 
Dorner, 120 
Dreams, 27 



Ecclesiasticism, 49, 97 
Education, Jewish, 47 
Education, primitive, 47 
Edwards, Jonathan, 120 
Egypt, 43, 74 
Emotions, religion and, 22, 

111 
Empu'e, Roman, 86 
Energy, life as, 69 
Epicureanism, 10 
Epistomology, 12 
Ethics, religion and, 24, 127 
Etiquette, 49, 50 
Evolution, 68, 105, 127 



Experiences, religious, 22 
Experimentation, 14 



Fact, material, 75, 83 
Faith, life and, 155 
Faith, reason and, 21 
Fear, religion and, 46 
Fire, tribal, 33 
Frazer, 33, 38 
Free will, 67 



Genius, insanity and, 60 
Genius, quality of, 79 
Gnosticism, 10 
God, notion of, 27 
Gravitation, 19 
Greek art, 44 
Guilds, Middle Age, 87 



Hellenism, 86 

Hehnholz, 36 

Hesiod, 36 

Hinduism, 81 

Hobbes, Thomas, 140, 141 

Homer, 36 

Hydrogen, 15 

Hymns, Vedic, 36 



Idealism, creative, 70, 71 
IdeaUsm, religion and, 71 
Ideahsm, transcendental, 10 
Imperative, categorical, 90 
Imperatives, ethical, 132 
Inhibitions, children and, 50 



INDEX 



159 



Inspiration, 78 
Instinct, the artistic, 75 
Interest, priestly and pro- 
phetic, 40 
Ion, 17 
Isaac, 95 
Israel, 74 



Jacob, 83 

Jehovah, 74 

Jesus, 58, 77, 136, 137 

Joy, rehgion and, 47 

Judaism, 42, 92, 111 



Kant, 72, 131 
KataboUsm, 51 
Knox, John, 125 



Mexico, 88 
Missions, foreign, 103 
Modernism, 98 
Mohammedanism, 4, 47 
Mosque, 113 
Mutiny, Indian, 4 
Mysterious and religion, 27 
Mysticism, 116 
Mysticism, Byzantine, 122 
Myths and their meaning, 33 



Napoleon I, 18 
Nations, seven, 31 
Negroes, African, 113 
Neoplatonic rehgion, the, 118 
Nietzsche, 61 
Northwest, winning of, 89 



Laboratory, 21 

Leibnitz, 12 

Levitical, the development, 

52 
Lincoln, strength of, 8 
Locke, John, 140 
Luther, 62, 124, 135, 140 
Lutheran Church, 98 



Machinery, magic and, 6 

Magic, 29 

Mana, 29 

Materialism, 10 

Mathematics, 13 

Matter, 129 

Method, experimental, 16 



Olympic feasts, 31 
Organization, rights within, 

31 
Origen, 123 
Owen, 120 
Oxygen, 15 



Paganism, 84 
Pantheism, 130 
Pantheon, 31, 35 
Parkman, 89 
Parsifal, 23 
Pascal, 123 
Paul, 137, 151 
Personal, God, 130 
Personahty, 70, 109 
Perugino, 70 



160 



INDEX 



Phoenicians, 35 

Plate, photographic, 20 

Plato, 72 

Polynesian words, 29 

Polytheism, 32 

Poseidon, 35 

Priest, 39 

Priest, ethics of the, 53 

Primitive man, 28 

Progress, 106 

Prophet, Jewish, 76 

Prophetic, the, interest, 56 

Psychology, 110 

Psychology, religious, 23 

Puritanism, 112 



Quackery, 80 
Quietism, 117 



Raphael, 70 
Rationalism, 104 
Reason, faith and, 21 
Reformation, 61, 96, 98, 140 
Reger, Max, 114 
Religion, aesthetic, 113 
Religion, definition of, 2 
Religion, function of, 25 
Rehgion, importance of 

study, 3 
Religion, primitive, 30 
Religion, types of, 108 
Revival, evangelical, 114 
Revival, rituahstic, 114 
Rhythm, group and per- 
sonal, 44 
Russian, the, church, 117 



Sabbath, 45 

Savages, 29 

Savonarola, 64, 80 

Schleiermacher, 73^ 110 

Scholasticism, 12 

Science, Christian, 90, 118 

Scotus, Duns, 123 

Seasons, cycle of, 34 

Selfishness, class, 75 

Sepoys, 4 

Sexual, religion and the, 111 

Shakespeare, 78 

Smith, W. Robertson, 29 

Socialist party, 6 

Socrates, 58 

Solidarity, the group, 147, 

149 
Soul, its aspects, 108 
Spencer, Herbert, 27 
Spinoza, 12 
Stoicism, 10 
Superstition, 7 
Swedenborg, 61 
Synagogue, 47 



Tables, law of, 96 
Taboo, 29, 50, 94 
Tahnud, 43 

Taste, appeal to, 20, 68 
Tauler, 115 

Taxes, remission of, 143 
Theology, German, 115 
Theosophy, 118 
Thirty Years' War, 92 
Toleration, 147, 149 
Totemism, 73 
Traditionalism, 84 



INDEX 



161 



Transfiguration, Mount of, Wagner, 23, 70 



63 

Tree, worship of, 32 
Truth, standard of, 30 
Turkey, 148 
Tylor, 28 

Uniformity, faith in, 19 
University, Mohammedan, 
47 

Values, rehgious, 23 

Virgil, 9 

Vision, creative, 80 



Wartburg, 124 

Water, illustration from, 15 

Weapons, 83, 139 

Wesley, 64, 125 

Women and religion, 7 

World, Oriental, 102 



Young Men's Christian As- 
sociations, 144 



Zeal, rehgious, 92 
Zwingli, 123 



MAR 7 131; 



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